Home Office - Summer Activities

The summer Activities programme for Mansfield 2002 is provisionally entitled "Exploring Our Cultural, Present, Future" The central premise of our activity will be to promote social cohesion with a target group of predominantly white working class youths between the ages of 16 - 19. These will be disaffected and excluded young people who are current not engaged in any form of mainstream social activity, and may be likely to engage in, or be exposed to right-wing activity and racist crime. HRN will promote cross-cultural dialogues via two sub-projects. In parallel to the cultural activities all the young people will attend active citizenship training programmes. These will explore themes such as 'Exploring Social Cohesion', 'Crime and Disorder' and 'Dual Heritage'.

The first of these sub-projects will be the production of a play, written by and acted by the young people. The play will celebrate Mansfield's diversity and promotes the themes of active citizenship, sharing spaces and cross cultural communication. The play will be performed in a local theatre at the end of September as part of HRN's Cultural Diversity Week. The end performance will be followed by HRN community dialogues were members of the cast, audience, the community and professionals can participate in an honest conversation regarding the state of social cohesion in Mansfield.

The second sub-project will be the training of young people in New Media technology. The group will then research historical images of Mansfield's diverse past. Following this they will produce images of Mansfield's current diverse communities and design images of the future. These images will then be re-produced onto postcards, posters and will also form the foundation of a booklet of past, present and future images. The future images will project ideas of cross-cultural pride, sharing spaces and youth participation. These postcards and other material will then be distributed throughout Mansfield's schools and community organisations. The images will also be exhibited as part of HRN's Cultural Diversity Week, followed by a community dialogue. All of the images will have cultural texts expressing the positive nature of diversity in Mansfield.