The Hyped project was funded by the National Lottery for the period January 1998 - Feb 2001. It set out to give disadvantaged young people in Leicester and Leicestershire a voice through the media and popular culture. We worked with five groups concurrently on projects. The groups were as follows:

Crownhills Community College (mainly South Asian Young people), First Out (lesbian, gay and bisexual young people) and Girls Breakout (rurally based girls group) took part in every project. Young men from Glen Parva Young Offenders Institute took part in all but three of the projects. Other groups to participate came from Leicester African Caribbean Centre, the International Youth House and Barleycroft Youth Centre.

The groups focused on issues which particularly affected their lives and worked through graphics, photography, copy writing and video to produce adverts and peer education materials with messages about the different issues.

Stokes Wood Poetic Sculpture

Something strange has appeared amongst the trees in the grounds of Stokes Wood Primary School. Soft Touch worked with Year 5 pupils to make a sculpture out of recycled wood and felled trees, incorporating poems.

Pupils designed and made the sculpture and wrote poems which were built into the design. The sculpture can be used by pupils during breaks, to play and sit on, and to develop their word power - there’s a giant Scrabble-type board and a poetry abacus to get the creative juices flowing.

Jim Jackson, a Soft Touch arts worker who helped the pupils create the poems said: "I was amazed with what the kids came up with in only four hours!

They didn’t see doing poetry as difficult and boring at all. Making the poems for something gave it a focus and some of the techniques we used to get them going worked really well, like using magnetic poetry sets".

Soft Touch worked with students at Hamilton Community College and Babington Community Technology College to create two series of books for secondary aged students who are at an early stage of learning English as a second language.

The idea originally came up through recognizing that there is little suitable reading material for students who are learning English as an additional language. The books were created through a series of workshops with a group of students in each college – they thought up the storylines and took the photos. Many of the participants were themselves from newly arrived communities and so could contribute ideas to make the books as relevant as possible. The books are being used in schools throughout Leicester and Leicestershire. They were were created in partnership with the Minority Ethnic Language and Achievement Service and the two colleges.

Through the Media Asian Sexual Health (MASH) Fund, Soft Touch worked with young people to make two TV adverts with safe sex messages for national and local Asian TV.

We worked with a young people’s drama group based at Soar Valley Community College – their challenge was to come up with ideas which were going to get across clear messages without being too controversial. The group identified as a key issue the fact that young Asian people and their parents simply did not talk about sex and relationships, both sides finding it difficult to broach the subject. So they came up with the idea of making two linked adverts, one encouraging parents to talk to their children and the other encouraging young people to talk to their mums and dads. The resulting ads combine Bollywood style, reminiscence, dreamlike fantasy and straight acting – all in 30 seconds each.

The MASH Fund was managed by Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Health Promotion Agency.

Soft Touch was contacted by the GAP (Gaining a Place) project in Beaumont Leys. A group of young women based at GAP, which provides temporary accommodation for teenage mothers and pregnant young women, wanted to make a magazine. Their idea was to explain some of the background to their lives in order to help dispel negative attitudes towards teenage motherhood.

Eleven young women contributed towards the magazine, which included writing, photos, poetry and questions and answers. It also contained information about the local Sure Start services."It [the magazine] dispels all the myths basically and it shows us to people in a different light and not what they usually think about us".

The project was part of the TAP-IN programme which ran for three years in Beaumont Leys, funded through the Single Regeneration Budget 5.