AMBASSADORS OF HOPE

Writers don’t come from where I come from.

As a young adult, I kept noticing how the media perception of my neighbourhood was always negative. I noticed local media outlets refer to my neighbours as “yobs and thugs”, which was frustrating as this wasn’t my experience of my neighbours. In the future I would like to see residents of Chalkhill less dependent on the state and more interdependent between one another.

Nabil – London

I came to the UK as an asylum seeker when I was two, fleeing conflict in Iraq. I moved into the Chalkhill Estate, owned and operated by MTVH, when it was first built in 2003. I’ve lived there ever since and feel like I’m engrained in the community.

As a young adult, I kept noticing how the media perception of my neighbourhood was always negative. I noticed local media outlets refer to my neighbours as “yobs and thugs”, which was frustrating as this wasn’t my experience of my neighbours.

In 2015, I came across a video on SBTV, a major social media platform popular in our inner city communities. The video was a short documentary about a book called: Authors of the Estate, written by St Raphael’s Estate, which is a neighbouring social housing estate down the road from mine. This piqued my interest and after some research, I’d learnt that the book was written by André Anderson and five other authors from his community who had come together to write about their experiences living on the St Raphael’s Estate, which they then slotted through the doors of 1,000 homes on the estate.

For me, this book challenged the perception that “writers don’t come from where I come from”. I was very inspired.

In 2019, my friend Naomi Wharton had organised a meet up with André and I. I told André that I wanted to explore the possibility of doing the same on my estate, the Chalkhill Estate. And murder she wrote, we got 22 authors together from my estate and we asked them to tell their own stories. The book was entirely funded by the Freedom and Balance art college. The college focuses on creative education for everyone and Authors of the Estate was one output of that— sometimes, mainstream education can be too focused on formal teaching and pure sciences, I would like to see us do a better job by young people who don’t learn in this way.

I’m spending quite a lot of time on Freedom and Balance projects, and we’re looking to roll out more work next year. To learn more, visit: www.freedomandbalance.com

In the future I would like to see residents of Chalkhill less dependent on the state and more interdependent between one another. I would also like to see organizations like MTVH nurture the existing talent that’s here on the estate and also help residents into property ownership.