Social enterprise - Roundabout Homeless Hostel

Music and video created by the young people at Roundabout's homeless hostel and the older people's supported accommodation across the road at St Barnabas House. We wanted to bring the two groups together in an inter-generational project which got the two groups talking to each other and where they could then create something together. We ran a 'speed-dating' style session with the young and old, using prompt cards such as 'what does love feel like' and 'do you believe in life after death', then recorded these conversations. One of the young people from the hostel then took samples of some of these conversations and turned them into a song in just five hours in the studio. We then brought the old and young groups back together at Silent Cities office, split them into pairs - one older person and one younger person, and gave them each a flip camera and 10 seconds of the song each to create content for a music video. We also had an artist in residence who encouraged them to draw what they felt whilst listening to the song. We also used images from these pictures in the music video. The music video was also edited with the help of one of the young people who had a particular talent in this area. And here is the result. The project was funded by Awards for All, and was a joint collaboration with Silent Cities and Roundabout Homeless, both based in Sheffield. You can also see some pictures of the processes here on our flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/silentcities/

The Roundabout hostel for young people is directly opposite an older person’s care home.

I was interested in the fact that both groups were living in supported accommodation at the opposite ends of their lives, and wondered what would happen if we got them talking.

I ran a ‘slow-dating’ event, where we put microphone’s on each table and gave each pair a set of cards with the Guardian magazine questions on (why waste a good idea?!)

The conversations were recorded. I have a transcript of them which would be fabulous for anyone who loves listening to local dialogue. And again, a wonderful piece of social history. 

One of the young people in the hostel, Ricky Malik, had an interest in music and so I booked him in at a recording studio to make a soundtrack using the dialogue we’d collected during the slow dating event. 

I then brought them all back together at our Silent Cities offices a week later to play them the soundtrack. They then split off to make a music video to go with the soundtrack. Ricky then pulled the clips and the soundtrack together to make this video. 

One of the things I loved most was watching them all pile back onto the minibus afterwards, all the young people helping the older people on the bus, and the way they naturally sat next to each other on the way home.