This month IY will continue the work they started in late July with CRI. The Leeds-based organisation works with adults recovering from drug addiction, and the phoenixers are doing a media campaign for them. “It’s about us helping to tell people’s recovery stories and giving adults who are on their journey to recovery some hope,” comments Kev. 

“These people are in a position where they’ve been involved in crime, are at the bottom-end of drug addiction and in a position where they have huge habits and their life is a cycle; their relationships are breaking down. Somehow, despite this, they have found a way of engaging with others and to make a real attempt at rebuilding their lives. They’re in a real inspirational place. When you meet them, listen to their stories and they tell you where they’ve been, and where they are now. It’s really inspiring.”

Inspired Youth are attempting to capture these individual stories through some graffiti art put together by long-term Inspired Youth collaborator Jim Cereal, and there will also be a film made with them at the end of the project.  ”The group will also be doing some poetry work with Liam ["Kritikal" Powers] to create work that becomes a narrative, possibly for the film; it’s about that journey of being ‘broken’, through to the freedom of being drug free.

The aim is that this final film will be shown at the CRI’s national conference and it will be presented to an audience of CRI workers. It will be going out into the community and into other CRI centres to inspire other people to believe that a recovery is possible.”

Next month, we’ll be talking more about the freerunner project (you can see a preview image above). It’s something that has been developing within IY for months, and now Kev reveals that it’s time to shoot a trailer and get it out there. “We are going to set up a crowdsourcing campaign and try and fund it that way. It’s going to tell people why we are making the video in the first place, and what the story is. It’s exciting to us, because it’s an entirely creative project that looks at what drives young people to “the edge” with drugs, crime and suicide even. It’s going to be a preventative thing, and we hope that it’s going to create some discussion.”

Filming for the Freerunner project is set for the end of August, and will shoot over three days. IY have been in touch with some freerunning crews and at the moment they are trying to cast it. The hope is that other businesses in the Phoenix (and past supporters of IY) like Orillo Production and Spinning Top Films will get involved and bring their skills in. “I am buzzing off of it,” smiles Kev. “It means a lot to me.”

For more information visit the official Inspired Youth website.

If you’re interested in getting involved in Freerunner then check out the group on Facebook.