Thursday 23 October 2014

Customise Ur Life Workshops : Leicester Riders Basketball Club Youth Offending Program

Ghostdavandal Originals presents Customise Ur Life Workshops
Leicester Riders Basketball Club Youth Offending Program
Field House, John Phillips Close, Garrendon Road, Loughborough
5th August 2014

The Ghostdavandal Team delivered a customisation and streetart workshop on behalf of Leicester Riders Basketball Club as part of their Youth Offending Programme.  The aim of the scheme is to utilise the Leicester Riders’ boarding facility ‘Field House’ to provide a variety of activities to engage the interests of young offenders alongside short educational sessions, looking at: knife crime; sex education; substance misuse and anti-social behaviour. The focus is to integrate these learning opportunities with the experience of developing independent life skills and life style and that's were we come in, to deliver our Customize Ur Life Workshop:Learning Through Creative Arts.


We arrived at Field House just before midday and after getting introduced to the staff, the programme coordinators and got shown around the venue, we set up for the afternoon activities. We were introduced to a group of about 8-12 young adults who were spending the residential week at Field House and partaking in different activities throughout the week. We were there for the day so the focus of the workshop was based on enhancing the young adults experience through creative arts and learning transferrable skills through creative art activities. Introductions kicked off the activities as a way to gauge and gain an understanding of what the young adults knew about street art and customisation and also a way to discuss the reasons why the programme was designed. Introductions include a brief presentation of who we are as a customisation and design company and who they are individually, where they are from and what their interest are. 


This is also part of the Exploration Stage of our workshops which acts as a tool for participants to engage in their personal interest and discover what makes them unique, it also is a way to reflect in who the individual is, a way to rediscover personal interests, goals and aims and if the participants fully engage could be truly transformational. 

The young adults engaged in the activities with enthusiasm, which reflected in the concentration they had whilst partaking in activities specially when it came to T-shirt design and spray painting. Most of the young adults had never used spray paints but were eager to give it a go, with some actually showing good listening skills and then applying what they had just learnt.  Some proved that they had more of a steady hand than some ( which was funny to see them compete against each other at who's better at spray painting...) which was evident to see on the T-shirts and murals designed and produced by themselves but overall the young adults seemed to understand what the activity was teaching them and enjoyed partaking in such activities.  



The young adults produced personalised T-shirts with their very own design that is unique to each individual and created through a process in which they had to discover their interests (individually or as a group), visually interpret their ideas into thumbnail sketches, symbols or by using shapes, colour and simplifying ideas into abstract concepts and then creating designs by using various design methods such as stencilling, cutting and copying or transfer. The young adults seemed to understand the concepts behind StreetArt and customisation, by creating their own designs from their personal interests, the young adults understood that customisation takes various forms such as clothing, accessorising etc but can also include people by enhancing personal experience through learning and utilising transformative skills that can be beneficial in self development. 

We would like to Specially thank Tahir Hajat, Chirag Praj and Kanu Kaur at The Leicester Riders (Youth Offending Programme coordinators), Leicester City Youth Offending Service, School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University and to everyone at Field House for accommodating us. Also special thanks go to The Ghostdavandal Team, namely Hitesh Patel and Marvin Hagglar, #customizeurlife #beoriginal


MH