Never forget the orange! Being a young advisor
Beth got involved as a child friendly Leeds young advisor, and worked on the child friendly Leeds awards.
“I never thought that when a couple of my friends and I went to the Leeds Art Gallery that I would ever have the opportunity to put on a show like this. I just thought I would be standing in on a couple small events. Never did I ever think that deciding to go inside when we saw all the banners would amount to this.
On the first meeting, we all met at the City Varieties in a really awkward circle and I honestly never thought that it would change from that. Being quite a reserved person, there wouldn’t be a chance of me being the first to come out of my shell and make a bit more comfortable. But the more meetings we had, I grew a whole lot more confident and actually held conversations with the rest of Y Productions and people who helped organise the event… Maybe it was the biscuits that were provided every week for us?
We started out writing on large sheets of sugar paper with felt tips and the wackiest ideas being wrote down like a police arrest and acrobat dangling from the ceiling. Then we moved to tables with orange headings – never forget the orange. The more the weeks went by, the more formal and organised it became, maybe that’s an OCD streak settling in.
It didn’t take too long for the 30th of January to come by and we were rehearsing. Everything was here. Everything that we had been working on for months, all the hard work was to finally pay off. It didn’t really sink in until I had the comms on my head and I was giving the 5 minute call out as stage manager. The night went pretty smoothly and very quickly. The crazy thing was seeing the performers I had scouted from the Breeze website on the stage instead of looking through many videos that they had uploaded on YouTube.
When the show had finished, I couldn’t help but sense an overwhelming feeling of proudness and achievement. How a group of seven young people and a team of professionals helping, could make this happen. How so many people left it in our hands and trusted us to put on the best show we possibly could. And also how many people could make such a difference to Leeds, looking at the nominees.
I would just like to say a final huge thank you for giving me the opportunity to take part in this, especially to Richard (Leeds City Council Voice & Influence Team) and Rachel and Catherine from City Varieties.”
To read more about the awards, see the child friendly Leeds awards page or watch a clip here. To find out more about child friendly Leeds, go to www.leeds.gov.uk/childfriendlyleeds
