Creative Mentor Amy Spencer describes exploring creative ideas in the ‘safe place’ of the art department with her mentee.
Hello, my name is Amy and I am a visual artist and mentor for SCEP. Since starting my training for the Creative Mentoring Programme back in November last year, I have been trying to imagine how it might play out in real life.
Acting out a role play scenario with an adult you know, is very different to being face to face with a young person who is looking up to you for guidance. The mentor I would like to be is emotionally unwavering, solid as a rock, predictably reliable and always confident. But when I first walked around those school corridors to meet my mentee, I’m not going to lie, I felt a wave of doubt come over me, am I going to be good enough? I didn’t want to let her down.
After the initial meeting was over I breathed a big sigh of relief, it went really well, much better than I could have ever imagined. At the start of the first session, both of us quickly marched straight towards our ‘safe place’… the art department. Here we are able to build trust with each other, explore creative ideas, share stories of the past as well as hopes for a bright future. Always sitting on the same table and in the same chairs each week, there is a familiarity and consistency to our approach. With this consistency, we are able to safely explore new materials to work with and to understand not only what we are doing technically, but our driving forces and what motivates us as creative people.
For me, the most valuable thing is to be able to give a young person the emotional and mental space to learn and to become more self aware. To see a young person quietly working out a difficult question, coming to their own conclusions, then creating their own set of questions for you to answer has been a fascinating thing to be part of, it’s almost like watching magic happen.
Amy
The Southampton Cultural Education Partnership’s (SCEP) objective is to develop a cohort of Creative Mentors as local role models in Southampton, who will work directly with and inspire Children and Young People, including those from at risk, marginalised backgrounds or NEET (not in employment education or training).
The SCEP works to nurture creative and cultural education for all children and young people in the City. We are a consortium of organisations working together, in partnership with Artswork.
The SCEP’s Better Lives Through Culture Programme (BLTC) is part of a large-scale investment of over £130K by Artswork to support an ambitious two-year programme set to directly benefit hundreds of children and young people across the city and focuses specifically on engaging young people at risk of exclusion.
Creative Mentors, part of BLTC, is a paid training opportunity open to early career creatives in Southampton to develop mentoring skills and provide 1-2-1 support to young people aged 11 – 18 years. A dynamic cohort of practitioners, from a diverse range of artforms have been recruited and will be trained by SoCo Music Project to become Creative Mentors, developing their mentoring skills, knowledge and experience. Throughout the programme they will be supported to mentor a Southampton-based young person (mentee) to achieve their goals.
In partnership with Artswork
