Culture Café Tells Stories

Culture Café Tells Stories is a new project working partnership with Derbyshire Virtual School and Learning Through Arts. We’re really pleased to have received funding for the project from The National Lottery Community Fund.

This is a pilot creative project working with storyteller, Sef Townsend, and Derbyshire’s unaccompanied asylum seeking young people aged 16+. The project will also be supported by Debi Hedderwick and Learning Through Arts’ Culture Café – a monthly social and arts event for refugees and asylum seekers and their foster carers.

Culture Café Tells Stories will bring young people together at Nottingham Playhouse with their peers to share common experiences, in a safe, fun and creative environment. Sef Townsend is a specialist in telling and creating stories using multiple languages and working with refugees and asylum seekers. A range of languages will be used alongside English, with support from an ‘English for Speakers of Other Languages’ tutor.

The young people that take part in this community storytelling project will be supported to develop skills and self-confidence, to build relationships with cultural organisations and feel the support of their new home communities. We look forward to meeting them, through informal sessions sharing food, games, socialising and of course listening to and telling stories!

Alongside Sef, we will be supporting a regional storyteller to gain experience on this project, increasing the potential for more of this work in the future.