Participation in Action: Youth Oskars explode media myths about young people

Jack Goldfinch set up the Youth Oskars more than four years ago at the age of 18 through his charity SE1 United, which provides youth-led events and activities to more than 1,000 young people a year.

Now aged 23, Goldfinch is pleased to see that the awards are still going strong. He says that by launching the annual ceremony he wanted to deconstruct the stereotypes he saw daily in the press and to praise the good work done by young people in the area.

“There’s this image of young people in the media as robbers, murderers, gang members, always hanging out on street corners,” he says. “At SE1 United we were seeing a completely different side of young people every day and so I wanted to set up Youth Oskars to showcase the good things that young people were doing.”

The awards ceremony held in December saw a group of 23 young people aged from 13 to 21 organise a glittering ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall for their peers. They had a £12,000 budget and took six months to plan the event, from contacting youth groups to ask for nominations to booking the performers such as dance troupes and a beat boxer.

The group also filmed interviews with nominees and their peers for screening on the night and secured sponsorship for prizes. They had to negotiate on everything from the photography to the catering budget.

Pierre Andre, one of the 18-year-old organisers of the most recent event, encourages young people to get involved in the next ceremony.

“It is a celebration of young people and those who enable young people to be celebrated, including youth organisations and youth workers,” he says. “It means a lot to all the young people, not just those who get the awards. You have to dress with meaning rather than just dress casually. You don’t get many formal events for young people.”

“Rudest generation”
SE1 United project director Natalie Bell says the young people involved learned a lot through organising the event: “The Youth Oskars gives young people a chance to turn around the image of them as the ‘rudest generation’. A lot of young people said that young people on TV were always shown as flippant, shallow and irresponsible. There were no good sides shown.”

To overcome this the young people hosting the 2011 awards ceremony invited the media to the event to meet young people.

“These young people had worked hard on this project for six months, they wanted to show what they can do,” says Bell. “They weren’t used to waiting for things, but they had to learn to wait for responses from businesses and wait to make decisions properly.

“Some of them presented in front of an audience, which they’ve never done before, and they got to do it with the best technical teams. That’s something that they’ll carry with them forever.”