Finding my place
What happens when 20 young people (who never usually join after-school activities) come together to create something entirely their own? Chaos, creativity, and a whole lot of courage.
We have been delivering GemArts Homework Club led by Zahra our Community Bridgebuilder at Gateshead Central Library since September 2024. Students arrived as strangers, with not a lot in common! Some of the young people were shy, some loud, all unsure but this Refugee Week they proved themselves as filmmakers, artists, and storytellers. This is what happens when young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds are given the space to dream out loud.
Stop-motion animation takes patience. A single second of film can require 12 painstaking adjustments. But for these young people, the real challenge wasn’t just the technical skill: it was believing their voices mattered enough to be heard.
At the beginning of this term they wanted to learn some digital skills and gain some confidence. They’re all tech whizzes on smart phones but stop-motion is a blend of technical know how and patient, analogue creativity. Yet by the end, they were teaching others how to make marionettes, standing tall during Q&As, and sharing their hopes for the future, even when they’d rather play it ‘cool.’
This wasn't like art projects they'd done at school, instead, it was a collage of dreams. One marionette hoping to become a doctor; another, a professional basketball player. One scene showed a reunion with family overseas; another, someone totally at home in their town. These weren’t just characters, they were pieces of the creators themselves.
When listing off their favourite animated films we had horror, classic silver age Disney, anime and Pixar. This group is incredibly diverse in interests but united in creativity, this group proved that ‘refugee and migrant youth’ isn’t a monolith: it’s 20 individual stories, 20 ways of seeing the world, and 20 reasons why spaces like this matter.
Take Y and M: two teenagers with the same label, living in the same town, yet navigating creativity- and mental health challenges in utterly different ways.
Y: The Quiet Filmmaker
Y spends most sessions folded into the back row, speaking only when directly asked (and even then, in hesitant English). But hand him a camera or a puppet, and his silence transforms. For his stop-motion segment, he crafted a scene of paper airplanes carrying tiny figures, Sudanese and Palestinian refugees across a blue sky. No dialogue, just the quiet implication: We’re all fleeing different wars, but the sky doesn’t care where you’re from.
The Barrier: Language isn’t just about words; it’s about who feels entitled to speak. Y’s creativity lives in the gaps between his thoughts and his ability to voice them in English. Animation gave him a way to communicate without translation.
M: The Charismatic Force Who Hates Slow Motion
M is all energy, she jokes in three languages, henna artistry, colourful doodles, the kind of confidence that makes younger kids orbit her. But stop-motion? "This takes forever," she groaned, after adjusting a puppet for the tenth time. Her finished segment was brief (a twirling figure in the city streets), but her real contribution came later: At the screening, she MC’d the Q&A, henna’d attendees’ hands with Arabic names, and stayed late stacking chairs.
The Barrier: Trauma often lives in the body as restlessness. For young people like M, who have survived instability, sitting still to painstakingly move paper limbs can feel like an act of trust she wasn’t ready to give. She showed up, just differently.
Why This Matters
Y needed a way to speak without words. M needed movement to counter the stillness. Neither engaged the way a "model student" might. But their breakthroughs weren’t in perfection. They were in these moments:
Y being asked what he would make an animation about if he could choose anything and confidently saying to a group of strangers “Palestine.”
M cheering on the other speakers, no sense of ego or competition, just celebrating her friends bravery.
For young people carrying asylum-based trauma, "participation" isn’t a checkbox. It’s a negotiation between what they can bear, what they dare to hope for, and who they’re ready to be that day. And that’s what made their film, and their courage, so extraordinary.
It’s one thing to make art in private and quite another to present it to a room full of people when you’re used to being overlooked. But they did it. They wrote and re-wrote their speeches to open the film screening, they practiced their henna to make designs for visitor s around translating names, and they hesitated before leading their workshops. They showed up. Reaching beyond creativity and finding resilience.
For many, this was their first time leading a workshop, speaking into a microphone, or seeing their work on a big screen. The nerves were real, but so was the pride when they realized: I made that.
This project could have used any medium, they tried DJ-ing and made illustrated collages. But choosing animation meant we could prove that when young people are given the tools, the trust, and the platform, they can far surpass their own expectations. And for 20 young people who don’t usually get to take centre stage, that’s everything.
Professional animator Sheryl Jenkins co-created this animation project with the young people and made sure it wasn’t just about teaching skills, but gave everyone a chance to tell their story, she passionately showed these young people that their stories are worth telling. And the crowd at our screening really wanted to hear those stories.
Next time you see a young person hesitant to share their work, remember this group. Confidence doesn’t always roar, sometimes it’s a quiet voice saying, Fine, I’ll try. And that’s where the magic starts.
We are grateful for funding support from Gateshead Community Bridgebuilders, Gateshead VCSE Menta Health Grant Funding and Arts Council England to enable GemArts to deliver this programme. A massive thank you to all the young people, volunteers, artist Sheryl Jenkins and all the support staff.