The GGC August Charity Spotlight

CREATE Paisley is a small local youth arts charity based in the Renfrewshire Area. 

Create began in 2009 as a monthly open mic night held at the UWS Union offering local young people a safe, fun, sociable place to attend at night. Through the success of the open-mic night Create then began to offer Creative Workshops in which they were very much young person focussed and the young people had their say in which direction Create would go.

2011 saw the change in Create from one open mic night every few weeks to support the young people more regularly throughout the month. This is the point that Created wanted to be more present in the lives of young people and moved to offer youth mentoring, youth forums, art workshops and a fortnightly open mic drop-in. 

The success of regular support and workshops led to Create becoming a registered charity in October 2012 which allowed for the goal for Create to be increasing the support for the local young people and being able to offer more opportunities that fit the vision for a better community. 

Creates main vision is to see young people transformed through the main values of the charity which are: creativity, community, confidence and finding their voice. 

We offer daily sessions which explore different pathways of arts for young people: podcast creation, mural projects, creative writing, hang out sessions and the create cafe. We are currently transitioning back to the in-person youth work after the difficult year we have all went through which saw all of the Create sessions taking place on Zoom. The purpose of these sessions allow for the youth workers to explore ways in tackling loneliness and supporting the mental health of our young people. This is done through talking about feelings, situations and surrounding environments and how they can express themselves through the different arts outlets. As well as our youth workers, Create often works with other similar youth groups as well as bringing in Professionals who come along and showcase their skills and work alongside our young people. 

Over the past year and a half Create continued to power through the pandemic and even though the numbers of young attendees dropped, we still hosted 156 events which saw us have contact with 65 young people across Renfrewshire and we were able to provide 1300 Boredom Boxes to our own Create attendees and beyond in 2020. 

Create have continued to grow in 2021 as the team has expanded to a youth work team of five employees and some volunteers as well as our Executive Director and then two members of staff in the Fundraising and marketing department. Create rely a lot on volunteers to support us in both departments and we are always keen to welcome new volunteers who can commit to support us.

Create continue to be present within the Renfrewshire Community as well as surrounding areas and over the past few months have been able to work with local businesses to secure funding through community funds, host online raffles with generous donations from local businesses and now we look forward to hosting more fundraising events and activities as the restrictions begin to ease. Going forward in 2021 Create will be looking to partner with schools in order to make more young people aware of who we are and what we do and how we can support them. We also will continue to fundraise to secure the continued running of the sessions that we put on for our young people, we will be doing this through Kiltwalk in September, working with local businesses and continuing applications for community funds.

We are always on the lookout for new ways to be supported within the community as well as how we can spread the word to more young people, if this is something that you as an individual or your business could support then please feel free to visit our website or contact myself via beth.ross@createpaisley.org.uk.

Beth Ross

Fundraising and Marketing Coordinator at Create Paisley. 

Check out the GGC interview here: https://youtu.be/YnMGjxhnUgI

Website: https://www.createpaisley.org.uk/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/create.paisley

Twitter: createpaisley

Instagram: createpaisley