All of us at No Brainer know how privileged we are to be working alongside some amazing companies and organisations. The variety and scope of the work we’re doing is, without doubt, one of the best parts of our job.
It means that every day in our world is a different one. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to work in journalism –then subsequently, PR, social and media relations – in the first place.
Digital life Stories
One of our clients is NYAS, and if you haven’t heard of them they are the National Youth Advocacy Service. The NYAS team, as well as hundreds of advocates and volunteers around the country, are doing some amazing work for young people in the care system. Genuinely amazing.
The passion and commitment we’ve seen from the people we’ve met since we’ve been working with them has been inspiring in so many ways. And the results they are achieving for young people across the UK are incredible.
Working with young people in Exeter
So, Account Manager Lauren and I were delighted to be able to spend a couple of days with NYAS advocates, volunteers and young people within the care system to work on the Digital Life Stories project recently.
Together with our partners at Trunk we flew down to Exeter and hosted a series of workshops – with the young people at the centre of the activities – to help them develop their understanding of film-making, video production, story-telling and marketing.
Lauren and I focused our workshops on what makes news and how story-telling with purpose is something we all do every day. The contributions we had from every one of the young people was amazing, and the stories they created blew us away.
Adam and the team at Trunk focused on film making, character creation and video production during their sessions and the ideas were nothing short of inspirational. The output will be an animation inspired totally by the young people we spent two amazing days with.
Trunk will now spend the next few weeks making their vision a reality, working together with NYAS, we’ll be organising a showcase event later this year.
It was inspiring to hear the ideas, to see the confidence grow, and to sense the excitement in the eight young people who took part in the two day workshops. There was a standout moment for me when one young man came bursting up to me on the second day, a scrap of paper in hand, showing me the story he’d written overnight. “It just came to me…I didn’t know I could even write stories!” he said.
It took a lot of preparation to organise the workshops which could, at times, prove to be a little bit challenging! But sometimes just a simple sentence like that makes everything worth the effort.
