For the last 10 years, my work has been rooted in how our communities hold and produce knowledge. Not knowledge that needs validating by institutions before it matters, but the knowledge that already exists between us. The knowledge that moves through conversations in youth clubs, through music, through stories, through family, through dance, through the everyday ways we make sense of the world together.

The challenge has never been that our communities don't have knowledge. It's that many of the infrastructures that allowed knowledge to move between us have been systematically dismantled, devalued or erased. Yet despite that, our communities have always found ways to carry knowledge forward. Through sound. Through oral histories. Through storytelling. Through dance. Through cultural practices. Through youth clubs, community centres, places of worship, front rooms and sound systems. Through the spaces where people gather and make meaning together.

At a time when culture is shaping how people understand politics, identity and belonging, it feels impossible to ignore the role that music plays in how knowledge moves. Music reaches places reports won't. It reaches people before policy does. It creates feeling before it creates language. The Each One Teach One: Youth Club Imagination Tour comes from these reflections.

The tour was built on the belief that youth clubs and community spaces are some of the most important cultural infrastructure we have. They're places where stories, memory, creativity and collective learning have always existed, even when resources haven't.

For me, the Youth Club Imagination Tour is really about returning art, imagination and storytelling back to community spaces. Too often, the most ambitious cultural work made by and about our communities travels everywhere except the places it comes from. Youth clubs become places where culture is consumed rather than recognised as something already being produced.The Youth Club Imagination Tour brings together three interconnected strands of work:

The first is Each One Teach One: Building the Dance. Where we will be hosting a 7 day residency in each Youth Club, building a collectively owned soundsystem centring collective making as a form of learning. Through sound system culture we explore shared ownership, governance, interdependence and what it means to build infrastructure together. The sound system isn't simply an object. It's a social technology. Everyone has a role. Knowledge is shared. Responsibility is collective.

The second is ICABSS (It Could All Be So Simple), an album and research project that uses Hip Hop, sound and film as ways of exploring memory, contradiction, resistance and what liberation might mean for those of us growing up in the ends. We will turn each youth club into an imagination station, using installations made by the community and host listening/screening of the ICABSS album as part of the residency, encouraging collective conversations, the project creates space for young people to reflect on their own experiences whilst connecting them to wider social and political questions. 

The third strand is OURCHIVE, the Youth Future Storytelling Fund, which will support 24 young people from working-class communities across the UK to develop storytelling projects rooted in their own lives, places, histories and relationships. Stories told from within communities rather than about them. Stories that remain accountable to the people and places they come from.

Together these strands create a space where imagination can be practised collectively. Where stories can move through sound, space and relationships whilst remaining connected to the communities that produced them. Because before we can build different futures, we have to create spaces where those futures can be imagined.

The beautiful thing about Each One Teach One is that it grows from what emerges in the room. A recent moment that really stayed with me happened during Music Is Black at the V&A. The two sound systems built through our work in East London came together in the same space. People shared stories, learning and experiences through sound. But what moved me most wasn't simply seeing the systems there. It was seeing people engage critically with the institution itself. Whilst participating in the exhibition, they were also calling attention to the V&A's extractive histories and asking questions about culture, ownership and power.

For me that felt beautiful because it showed exactly what community knowledge can do. For too long we've treated music, sound, and creativity as secondary to learning, when some of the most important learning I've ever experienced has happened through cultural practice.

What excites me about working with Big Change is that they're creating space for us to deepen work we've already been exploring through Each One Teach One and to test new ways of learning together. A big focus of the partnership will be supporting the Each One Teach One residency programme, which sits at the heart of the Youth Club Imagination Tour. In the first year we'll be working across Huddersfield, Birmingham, Bristol and High Wycombe, spending a week and a bit in each youth club building sound systems together. We're doing this alongside an incredible group of partners Mark from Felt Sound System, alongside our design team Akil, Jana and Ella from Resolve Collective, Conscious Youth, Hoodfutures Studios, Relatable Role Models and Rise collective artists and young people in each place.

But for us, building a sound system has never only been just about building a sound system. The sound system becomes a vehicle for learning. Together we'll explore where sound system culture comes from, the conditions that produced it and the communities that built it. We'll look at how sound systems travelled across diasporas, how they became forms of communication, resistance and collective organising, and what political conditions people were responding to when they created them. If part of the colonial project was controlling whose knowledge counted, then part of our work is creating spaces where communities can reconnect with the histories, technologies and cultural practices that have always allowed knowledge to travel between us.

We're not just teaching technical skills. We're creating space for collective inquiry. Space to learn from culture. Space to learn from each other. Space to think about the futures we're trying to build and the infrastructures we'll need to sustain them. I want to see more investment in socially critical music and cultural practice. More recognition that culture doesn't simply respond to society, it shapes it. 

My hope is that we continue building the infrastructure that allows knowledge to move between us. Through Each One Teach One and through the Youth Club Imagination Tour, I'd love to see a network of young people across the UK connected through shared learning, stories and sound. A network where people exchange ideas, share music, tell stories and support one another. A network where youth clubs continue to exist not simply as services, but as cultural infrastructure. As places where communities can gather, learn, create and dream together.

Ultimately, I believe the future is collective. And if we're serious about creating different futures, then we need spaces where those futures can be imagined from within our communities rather than imposed from outside of them. 

Photo: Melissa 

Read more about Each One Teach One.