Our activities and impact

Make (Good) Trouble (MGT) works alongside a diverse range of young people and families, opening up new paths of access to professional support for mental health and emotional wellbeing. 

The Covid pandemic restricted our ability to continue our work to support families and young people. During lockdown, as schools closed and education moved to the home, parents and children struggled with a variety of mental health issues such as isolation, family conflict and anxiety. Our focus  shifted to creating a safe space for our growing network of parents, carers and young people to communicate with professional and relevant charity groups through online platforms, for example through our Facebook Group ‘Raising Teens in Lockdown’ which attracted 1.7k local members within 3 months of launching. 

By the end of March 2020, the majority of our work was carried out remotely. 

Over the year, we developed strong relationships with a network of local charities and community groups including Albion in the Community, Audio Active, CAPA, Dad La Soul, East Sussex Youth Cabinet, Football Beyond Borders, NACOA, Oasis Project, Relate, RU_OK?, the Trust for Developing Communities, Winston’s Wish, and the YMCA.

Our work provided an essential bridge between struggling families and Local Authorities, Sussex Police, the OSPCC, CCG and other services.

Make (Good) Trouble is accredited on the Digital Badges scheme as part of the Brighton Cities of Learning programme, and we awarded 54 Digital Badges to young people across the South East of England

In February 2020, we joined the Brighton Kickstart scheme put together by Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival (BDBF), working together with Future Creators. It allows us to provide a young person with reliable employment and offer vocational training in media production. MGT is one of 20 local organisations offering over 80 work placements in the arts, publishing, PR, digital media and other creative opportunities. Future Creators will facilitate the scheme, working with local businesses and organisations to provide paid work placements for 16 to 24-year-olds claiming Universal Credit.

Belong

Make (Good) Trouble worked in partnership with The Office of Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner (OSPCC) and education consultants, Changing Chances, to deliver an evidence-based phase of project BELONG. Its aims are to empower vulnerable children, most likely to be excluded from school, by helping them learn how to regulate their emotions and reduce the risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of serious violence.

This was part of the OSPCC’s REBOOT programme, a non-criminal pathway providing direct intervention support for young people aged between 10-17, where a risk has been identified of them being drawn into crime and violence. Starting in November 2019 and finishing in March 2020, Make (Good) Trouble carried out weekly interactive workshops delivered in four stages; Listen, Coach, Analyse and Acknowledge. A safe creative space gave young people the chance to speak about their experiences and learn about the teenage brain, including strategies for managing their own emotions.

In March 2020, the pilot phase of BELONG ended and we held a celebratory event where participants were given certificates and screened a film about the project. Sixteen young co-creators and their families attended to celebrate their part in the project which aimed to empower vulnerable children, most likely to be excluded from school, by helping them learn how to regulate their emotions and reduce the risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of serious violence. 

In its first year of launching, the REBOOT programme successfully deterred 823 young people away from becoming victims or perpetrators of serious violence.

Our sessions had 90% attendance from the 16 young co-creators on the project and generated 24 hours of recorded research. Twelve digital badges were issued to participants. BELONG’s incredible 90% attendance was due to building trust over time.  Participants felt safe, were helped with transport and, importantly, offered food (some hadn’t eaten all day).  All de-identified outputs were shared with the OSPCC and the local authority for shared learning. 

“I feel like it takes a lot of stress away…makes you feel less anxious, more energetic, really happy and accepted.” BELONG co-creator, aged 12 

“It makes everyone understand what’s happening in our brains and how it makes us act towards other people. I’ve really thought about what we did last week and I think it really helped me understand my feelings a lot better and how to put them into words.” BELONG co-creator, aged 14

Raising Teens

We extended our Raising Teens brand this year to include a dedicated, closed Facebook group called Raising Teens in Lockdown, a direct response to the pandemic, and series of Facebook live-streaming Q&As, as well a fourth series of our BBC radio show. The brand aims to help parents and young people to understand each other better and to raise awareness of issues that matter most to young people.

Raising Teens in Lockdown Facebook Group

At the beginning of Lockdown, we quickly reacted to the fast-growing concerns of parents and young people about their mental health, their education and their family relationships. This closed Facebook group offers families a supportive and safe space to ask questions, share their concerns and receive help and advice from their peers as well as our network of experts, from local police to trained therapists, educational specialists and psychologists. Within a month the Facebook group attracted over a thousand members, 80% of whom are active daily contributors. Fifty percent of members are from Brighton & Hove, with many others from East and West Sussex, London, Leeds, Southampton, Manchester, Cardiff and Leicester, as well as other countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Raising Teens BBC radio show

Series three of our BBC radio show, Raising Teens, was recorded entirely remotely in spring 2020 by the whole team – a first for BBC Radio Sussex and for MGT. The series covered issues that were at the forefront of teen and parent concerns: Pandemic Anxiety, Home Schooling and Education in Lockdown, Separated Parenting in Lockdown and Domestic Violence, all crucial issues around surviving lockdown, the pandemic, and its effect on family mental health. 

This Raising Teens radio show delved deeper into the parent-teen relationship in lockdown and provided practical, expert advice to parents, carers and teenagers, helping them to navigate the challenges during the coronavirus crisis. The series aired between 20 May and 10 June 2020 and is available on BBC Sounds. 

Raising Teens Facebook Lives

MGT held a series of live-streamed Q&As on Facebook with professionals including educationalists, Sussex Police, charities, psychologists and therapists covering issues about schooling, policing in lockdown, drug use, parenting, anxiety, conflict, safety and male mental health. Each of our Facebook Live Q&As averaged over 5K views and 23K reach.

• Concerns about weed and drugs, with Sussex Reboot youth counsellor Carl Scott, PC Joe Davis from Sussex Police, Luci Hammond from RU-OK?  and Toby Chown from Oasis Project
• Men’s Mental Health, with Carl Scott from Reboot Sussex, Glen Wiseman from. YMCA Downslink Group and Lee Hines from East Sussex College
• Learning from home, with Darren Abrahams
• Dealing with conflict, with Kit Messenger from Changing Chances
• Helping at risk young people, with Reboot Sussex
• Anxiety in teens and coping strategies, with Kit Messenger from Changing Chances 
• Keeping teens safe, with PC Joe Davis
• Back to school, with Sussex Community Foundation Trust sleep expert, Lara Rutherford and YMCA e-wellbeing‘s Nicola Harvey
• Exams and education, with education specialist Jo Harvey

We Are Poppy

MGT’s First World War project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, explored the mental health and wellbeing of women during WW1. This was part of the First World War Centenary. There has been a huge focus on the effect of shellshock on men in WW1 but scant information available about the effect on women’s mental health during that time. Working with a team of young co-creators from Hove Park School, plus academics and mental health professionals, our project aimed to uncover the lives of women affected and to create new narratives which will look at how mental health was perceived then in comparison with today.  

With lockdown, all our face-to-face workshops were abruptly stopped and planned trips to museums and archives had to be shelved. Our whole project switched to one that was developed and delivered online. We expanded our project team to include young people from the East Sussex Youth Cabinet – all our co-creators were 14 years-old. We altered plans to make a film of the project’s progress and findings and switched to create an audio podcast. 

We met for workshops on Video conference calls, used WhatsApp and email to catch up and organise team meetings and recorded interviews remotely using our experience of making our lockdown radio series, Raising Teens. The adaptation to digital only formats created new opportunities for our young co-creators. They were able to share their story with a much wider audience than originally envisaged.

Our co-creators developed a podcast and website, www.wearepoppy.org, which included audio interviews with historians and experts in trauma therapy, and a podcast that dramatized the experience of women’s experiences during the First World War. The team’s enthusiasm, intelligence and ability to get involved and have a go at interviewing, recording, writing and presenting pieces for the podcast – all done remotely – was outstanding.

Our young co-creators were interviewed live on BBC Radio Sussex and BBC Radio Surrey, talking about how they developed the project in lockdown. The podcast was aired on the same stations in full on Remembrance Day, November 2020. 

The project was promoted on the Imperial War Museum blog, which you can read here.

“Nobody seemed to remember that women had been affected too. Nurses working on the front lines saw terrible things. Women at home had their houses destroyed and workers in ammunition factories often had life-changing injuries.” Daisy, 14, We Are Poppy co-creator

“I feel like it’s opened my mind more than it would have been because we don’t learn much about women in our lessons in history. The project really expanded my view of what women were doing and how women felt in the First World War.” Arielle, 14, We Are Poppy co-creator

“Just imagining her as a real person helps with empathy, putting myself in her shoes because usually you just hear about these people from the olden days and you think, ‘oh that’s a bit sad’, but when you imagine them as real people, you can put yourself in their shoes, see how they were feeling and really imagine what they were going through. I knew about the men and their shellshock and how mental health wasn’t such a well-known thing back then, so how they were all discovering what that was but it hadn’t even occurred to me that the women would get shellshock or PTSD from working on the frontline.” Amelie, 14, We Are Poppy co-creator

Brighton Streets Conference 

In March, our young people interviewed attendees to the Brighton Streets Conference, creating an edited video giving the organisers and visitors to the event qualitative feedback about speakers and discussions to reduce violence in the city. 

CAPA First Response

We worked with charity CAPA (Child and Adolescent to Parent Abuse) First Response to create a series of social media assets that raise awareness of the issues around child to parent abuse. 

East Sussex County Council and East Sussex Youth Cabinet 

We hosted and edited a series of webinar films for East Sussex County Council and the East Sussex Youth Cabinet on the subject of returning to school after lockdown, with the aim of allaying fears and concerns from parents and young people.

Other initiatives included:

• Radio Reverb – interviews with Make (Good) Trouble founder, Daisy Cresswell about young people’s mental health, January 2020
• BBC South East Today  feature about our Facebook Group, Raising Teens in Lockdown, April 2020
• Interviews with Children’s Commissioner for England – MGT’s young reporter, Lola Ray, interviewed Anne Longfield about her role as Children’s Commissioner for England and what she aimed to do for young people in lockdown. Lola and a team of young MGT volunteers were invited back to answer Anne’s questions in a follow up video, June & July 2020 
• ‘Extraordinary’ short film – Make (Good) Trouble teamed up with Storythings to make this film especially for Year 11s who missed out on their final months of secondary school and prom. The film features a new poem, ‘Extraordinary’ by Brighton Festival guest director Lemn Sissay MBE, together with messages from local schools. The film was made by Storythings and Make (Good) Trouble with support from Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival and Brighton & Hove Music & Arts, August 2020
• Interview on BBC Radio Sussex with Sussex Police to talk about Sussex Police’s initiative to reduce knife crime, October 2020
• Guest blog posts – including posts from young people around the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, the effects of social media, and advice about cannabis.
• Video Q&A with Knowso – Daisy Cresswell spoke about MGT to Knowso, a company set up to inspire and help women set up their own businesses. 

At all these events we raised the issues that affect young people, and many provided them with a platform to share their views and have a say in initiatives that would affect their future.

How we involve stakeholders in what we do

Our stakeholders are the young people we work with as well as local parents and guardians. Young people are co-creators on everything Make (Good) Trouble produces and their ideas and opinions drive everything we do. We honed our stakeholder feedback and delivery mechanisms with young people via a peer-to-peer model and trained young co-creators in how to ask ‘clean questions’, Mental Heath First Aid, and media production skills. 

We regularly consult our young co-creators to involve them in all parts of the creative process, including coming up with new project initiatives. They have been actively involved in every project from inception to delivery. 

Parents and guardians have been a big focus for 2020/1 and we have created and manage the Raising Teens in Lockdown Facebook group entirely ourselves. It was part-funded by the  National Lottery Communities Fund. This has been an excellent platform for picking up on concerns early – for example anxiety in young people, drug use and schooling. We also carried out an online survey with our stakeholders asking about their main concerns and issues so we could focus on providing relevant resources and support.  

“This [Facebook] group has been a lifeline to us! Great work, whoever set it up… I’m so grateful to you all for supporting us, sharing your woes and making me realise it’s all normal. What a journey lockdown has been (still is). I really hope the group will stay after? 
 Thank you to all of you” Raising Teens in Lockdown Facebook group member

Stakeholders are also youth workers and teachers and public health teams. We have been involved in consultations with Local Authorities (East Sussex, West Sussex and Brighton & Hove) on a regular basis as well as through our school and FE college networks. These consultations have resulted in new project development as well as support and advice for vulnerable communities and families in Brighton & Hove, East and West Sussex and beyond.