Re-Write Your Story at a Young Offenders Institution

We recently delivered an intensive 2 day programme Re-write Your Story to a group of 8 young people in YOI Wetherby. The programme aims were to encourage recognition of negative behaviours and teach how to look at the future differently through music. Through the use of story writing and poetry young people will learn how to create lyrics, music and songs for self-expression. The workshops were underpinned by the use of restorative practices to support recognition of anti-social or criminal behaviour to encourage positive decision making and staying away from criminality and gangs

All participants requested to be part of the project and inital assessment during the taster session prior to delivery highlighted preferred musical tastes as being grime and hip hop.  The group were from different wings within the prison, from diverse backgrounds and the majority were serving long-term sentences.  The group had not worked together before but most had previously taken part in in-house music workshops. 

The workshops began with an introduction to restorative approaches and an understanding of how words, lyrics and music can be used for self expression and explanation to support communication with family, friends and potentially victims how they feel, express empathy and request forgivness.  This was followed by working with a poet-song writer who performed some of his works and encouraged the group to come up with words and lyrics.  The remainder of the sessions were working with a musician to pull everything together and create individual and group songs that they performed and creating artwork to illustrate songs.  The resultant songs were far removed from Grime and surprised the group, the team and prison staff and feedback was excellent:

- This was an amazing project and the young people got so much from the sessions, very worthwhile.

- The program was fantastic! The Young People responded so well to all of the team and were extremely impressed with Alex. I went to see the class today and they were asking when we could invite them back!!

- Andy, Alex and Terry are a credit to Resource Creatives and it was amazing having them in the establishment. I left work on Friday on such a high, it was a pleasure to facilitate during their workshops.