Hello! My name is Emma Perry and my social action project was called the Knowle West trail. I did this project being a part of the grassroot activators programme (gap for short) as a project in my local community alongside 2 others on the course, Brandon and Abbey.
Our social action project took us 6 weeks to plan and execute, firstly planning what it is our focus will be, then where we will hold it and who our audience will be.
Our main focus for our social action project was around affirmations and mental health in young people. What we did was create an “affirmation walk” around the northern slopes in Knowle west and hung positive affirmations from trees for the young people to find and see if they relate to any affirmations put up around the slopes.
Once they found all the affirmations we headed back to the urban pursuit roundhouse. We made the round house really cosy and had a plethora of snacks, food and hot drinks followed by Brandon running a pass the parcel game. Once we finished doing that we wrote down our favourite affirmations of the evening and headed outside to the fire pit and got a fire going.
Once we headed outside and gathered around the fire I led a relaxing meditation session, showing young people a good way to help them relax in stressful situations, many came away from that session saying the meditation helped them massively and made them feel really calm and relaxed. The session ended just after that and we got feedback from a lot of people that attended saying the affirmations and meditation made them feel good and they would use it in the future, personally I think the walk was a massive success and I'm glad that I did it with the help of my friends and Ben carpenter and Judit Davis from Gap.
