Having spent over 15 years as a youth worker, cultural practitioner, and organiser in South London, Jaden had close interaction and eventually frustration with surface-level interventions that fail to address the root causes of harm, experienced by young people and their communities.

He set up Each One Teach One around a set of urgent questions: 

• What if sound was treated as an infrastructure for learning?
• What if youth spaces were places of imagination rather than containment?
• And who gets the right to reimagine systems in the first place?

The work creates space for young people from under-served communities, often those most affected by systemic harm to be recognised as knowledge holders, cultural producers, and co-designers of their own futures. Rather than extracting insight from young people, the programme invests in their capacity to think, build, govern, and care collectively. 

Rooted in sound system culture, Hip-Hop, and collective organising, the project draws on intergenerational knowledge exchange as a radical practice. Elders and young people come together to share skills, histories, and political understanding in ways that are culturally intuitive and grounded in lived experience. Sound becomes both a medium and a methodology, a way of transmitting memory, values, and possibility when language, policy, and reports fail to reach.

A defining feature of the programme is its hands-on, material approach. Through immersive residencies in youth clubs, young people co-design and build community-owned sound systems. Alongside developing technical skills in carpentry, wiring, maths, and design, participants explore questions of governance, collective stewardship, and shared responsibility. The sound system is not just equipment, it is a community asset, a living classroom, and a test case for alternative forms of ownership and care.

• Each One Teach One will build intergenerational knowledge exchange into the heart of youth spaces, recognising young people from under-served communities as knowledge holders and co-designers of their own futures.
• Through hands-on learning in design, carpentry, engineering, and governance, young people will gain practical skills while reconnecting with intergenerational knowledge, history, and political education that grounds their work in a deeper sense of context and power.
• Through a UK youth club tour, Each One Teach One will develop a replicable model that transforms youth spaces into hubs of learning and imagination, influencing how education, youth provision, and community assets are designed, funded, and governed for the long term.

Jaden Osei-Bonsu grew up in South London and has spent over 15 years working as a youth worker, cultural practitioner, and organiser. His practice is rooted in lived experience and shaped by a deep frustration with surface-level interventions that fail to address the root causes of harm experienced by young people and their communities.

Alongside grassroots projects, Jaden leads youth programmes at the Centre for Knowledge Equity (CfKE), where he designs UK-wide initiatives that value lived, learned, and practiced experience equally. He is a musician under the name Eerf Evil (“Live Free” spelled backwards), using sound as a form of ethnographic research and political education, and a co-founder of The Silhouettes Project, a community-run artist collective working across music, organising, and cultural infrastructure. 

Across his work from building free-access studios and community-owned sound systems, to co-designing youth-led funding models and festivals, Jaden is committed to developing alternatives to extractive systems. His practice centres youth agency, intergenerational learning, and collective ownership, asking not just how young people participate in society, but how they shape it.