photo: Emily Cowan

Climate change, one of the most pressing issues of our time, is often viewed as a distant future threat, separate from daily life. FutureCoast Youth was a collaboration between Feral Theatre, University of Brighton Media Researchers, ONCA Arts & Ecology, and Dorothy Stringer School, which aimed to empower young people – the generation who will be most affected by climate change, but who are often given the least voice – to imagine and explore responses to it, through participatory storytelling, play and performance.

FutureCoast Youth extended the FutureCoast project developed by US games designer, Ken Eklund: an online digital storytelling project which asks audiences to create voicemails from climatically changed futures. FutureCoast Youth built on this participatory imaginative premise to bring climate change to young people in Brighton. Using play, storytelling, ideas of time and of how to relate climate change to the everyday, we worked with Environmental Science GCSE students to explore their understandings of – and responses to – climate change. FutureCoast Youth culminated in a Young People’s Climate Conference at ONCA, with students presenting ideas in role as a conference delegation, to coincide with the COP21 UN climate convention (Paris, December 2015), communicating with their audience what they felt about climate change, and what they believed should be done to address this issue.

Futurecoast Youth was funded by ONCA as part of its two year ACE-funded Navigating Change programme and the University of Brighton On Our Doorsteps seed fund.

See more at https://futurecoastyouth.wordpress.com/