By Emb Hashmi
Birmingham welcomes an inspirational new television platform for young people.
Lord Digby Jones inaugurated the new media platform designed for the youth. Friday 15th February saw a host of influential media organisations, industry and high profile business leaders come together to celebrate the birth of this innovative creative visual art form.
The station was founded by a Birmingham based Social Enterprise, Ulfah Arts, who began on two unique ideas ‘ Art for Art Sake’ and Arts for Social change’, and was developed after a 12 month feasibility study and input from at least a dozen focus group.
The visual platform aims to be researched, produced and written by young people aged between 13 to 25 from inner city areas of Birmingham and surroundings cities.
YTV aims to convey a four point plan which includes developing volunteering opportunities on productions developed by youth television.
The inspirational programme hopes to deliver 600 volunteering opportunities, 200 work placements and 300 mentoring opportunities annually.
The programme has successfully pioneered working relationships with organisations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, British council, and the Media Trust to name a few.
Asian World spoke to guests, volunteers and performers at the launch.
Archie is a spoken word poet from Birmingham he said “Youth TV supported us with our thing, and we wanted to come and show our support.”
Salina Khan is a young person on a Youth TV prgramme she told Asian World “I am a trainee radio producer, which I do outside of studying for a law with French degree, I am so excited by Y TV.”
Prashant Singh is the chief executive officers for Ulfah Arts and has been in his position for 4 years. He said. “ Youth TV comes under the umbrella of Ulfah Arts and evolved from the already successful youth radio. Prashant said “more and more people got involved and wanted another media platform like TV production, so after research and consultation the British council stepped into to support us with seed funding and we put our plan into action. Youth TV wants to create successful media personalities and give young people opportunities they would normally only dream about and giving young people from the south Asian community a different career path then the stereo type, “there isn’t that many in the south Asian community who have really done very well in the media I can name probably a handful.”
11 kids are from the south Asian community out of the core group of 30. We have young kids from Pakistan India and Bangladesh working together when historically these 3 countries don’t get along but they work very well together.
“In a years’ time we want to be totally funding free, we would like to launch 30 full scholarships to study media productions at university.” said the CEO.
Asian World wishes Youth TV every luck and success.
