My work at Gray’s School of Art is involved with a diversionary program called Street Sport, the program brings a portable football pitch to areas where sports facilities aren’t readily available for kids to get involved in positive sporting activity. Street Sport also runs arts and creative learning sessions along side the football.
The program has been shown to reduce disruptive and antisocial behavior as well as introducing a healthy lifestyle to the kids who engage with Street Sport.
Recently the team with support from partner agencies from across Aberdeen looked to expand the program with cycling and a weekly portable pump track session to engage with a wider audience who don’t just want to play football.
To help secure the funding a portable pump track was set up at Northfield Academy, an area that Street Sport already operates within so that pupils at the school could sample the pump track to help build interest.
We used the session to film a pitch video that kids and young adults at the school will be able to watch, they will have the opportunity to vote on it and other potential projects in their area.
I used the pump track event as an opportunity to hold an on location filming workshop with some of my students who produced the video above which was used to support the application for funding. Filming and document in live environments is a difficult skill to simulate in the class room so whenever events such as this come up I try to get the student out the school and on site for some real world experience.
Hopefully the demo event and the video will be enough to excite the pupils of the school and win their votes so the project can run for a full year.
