What happens when you bring together a group of twenty-something year old creatives and ask them to run an event for Margate Bookie's literary festival in 2021? 

Lockdown has bought many challenges and the creative industry has been hit hard. For young people who are just trying to get established in the arts it's been a particularly tough struggle. This is why it became so important for us all to get involved in something creative during lockdown. We needed to be a part of something. Margate Bookie is giving us a chance to do this and gain something extra for the CV, to get us to where we want to be when this all blows over. 

We call ourselves the Margate Bookie young producers and the programme is being delivered by Co-relate on behalf of the Margate Bookie charity. Since 2015, Margate Bookie has been putting on the friendly lit fest by the sea and when the pandemic came, the events went online. Keen to find new audiences, the festival has been working with Co-relate to expand their youth voice.

Going into the young producers, I did not have any expectations. I knew of one of the mentors but I did not know who I was going to be working with. I was surprised at the depth of experience in the group. We’re teachers, support workers, students, unemployed and on furlough. And we're all creatives. This saw our one event quickly turn into four! 

With a vague idea of what we wanted to achieve, we split off into teams. These are: HR, marketing, ideas development and funding. In the spirit of wanting to learn something new, I opted for funding. I was a little bit unsure about this at first because ideas are what I do best, but funding turned out to be a positive experience for me. 

This saw our one event quickly turn into four! 

Funding’s always been this mythical thing that projects need to find but I have never really known where to look. It’s been a good eye opener to find out there are accessible funds out there.

I’ve found the use of online technology to deliver events makes me more nervous. We're currently planning the first in our series of four - an online game show - and running scratch events to get familiar with the technology and test the format we've come up with. I had to quickly wrap my head around Discord for the second scratch and while our content is strong, I sometimes still struggle to envision how it will all come together.  

It’s also been super interesting to see what happens to your own ideas when you let go and get other people to take on the ideas development. Our events are turning into something really good, I don’t think any one of us alone would have been able to come up with some of these!

Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming young producers events on the Margate Bookie website.