BEAT Carnival – the pioneering community arts organisation known for its impressive St Patrick's Day parade floats in Belfast – have received funding from the National Lottery Fund to further their community and outreach work.

The company were awarded £322,000 from the National Lottery Fund to further their work and develop programmes which will help young people express themselves creatively and give them a chance to champion the issues which are important to them.

The 'Our Space' programme will receive funding for five years.

Rebecca Boyd, Project Manager at Beat Carnival, said: “The idea for the project originated from two things, the TBUC project Tanya was working on and our European project with seven other cultural centres around Europe. It was about spaces of transformation, arts and education. While we were doing these two projects beside each other we ended up looking at how we could put them both together to help young people.

“Young people are reporting more and more their mental health is declining and we’ve found young people have clung to this space, it’s more important to them than ever before and they all declare it as their safe space and the place they can fully be themselves.

“There’s so much that’s special in that so we wanted to cultivate it and also expand it into other places so as well as having our own in-house projects we also wanted to focus on outreach and looking at schools and youth groups and how we can help people build in more creative self-expression to help them.”

Tanya Kearns, Youth Development Officer at Beat Carnival said: "The Tuesday night programmes called ‘Junior Beats’ are multi-house education programmes. On Wednesday we have art for social action so young people can come in and talk about issues they’re passionate about like LGBTQ+ rights, mental health, climate change and we create art that expresses that. It’s all about helping them express issues that are important to them.

“On Wednesday nights we also have a Beat and Tech group for older primary school children who come in and do music production like drumming, a mixture between samba music and taking that and teaching them how to put it into digital tracks.”

“Alongside that we’re also supported to work out along with different community groups and schools and we can use everything we’ve learned from our in-house projects and use that.

“This is brand new to us and we’ve always worked in a short-term way and now we’ve got five years of funding to put this into action on a longer term basis. We’re looking for schools to take part in this and do short and long term projects for young people to express themselves."

The company are excited to be able to expand on their initial programmes and will now be planning how to implement everything and will be beginning to get some local schools involved in their newly expanded programmes.

Rebecca said: “It’s so exciting because we’re getting to plan this all out. We’re also training some of our oldest young people in the ‘Future Leaders’ programme and giving them training and skills so they can do their own projects, so anything they’re super passionate about they have the skills to go out and run their own projects.

"Our next step is reaching out to schools over the next months. The long term goal is to work with schools all over Northern Ireland but at the beginning we will be focusing on schools in West and North Belfast."

Tanya added that it was great to see some funding coming in for the arts.

“In a world where everything is short-term funded and poorly funded it’s good to know that now we have five years to build on everything we’ve been doing and to expand it. It will be a great opportunity to take stock of everything we've learned and work on how to make it bigger and better."