Author: Community TV Trust

LET’S TALK, CTVT’s four year project looking for breakthrough initiatives to confront knife crime and youth violence, has been producing discussion videos since Autumn 2020 and now in 2022 has run two more Forums and is close to completing a documentary “CHANGE OF THOUGHT”,  featuring three young teenage boys who from a point of near school exclusion are now delivering training sessions to recruits for London’s Met Police.

Local organisation Elevated Minds, run by Doreen Sinclair-McCollin, has worked with the boys to create sustainable change between their community and the Police.

Other voices in the documentary include a wide range of Southwark young people, barrister Stephen Akinsanya, playground manager Stephney Bent, Sherifa Carr of Passion For Change, and Sayce Holmes-Lewis of Mentivity.

LET’S TALK videos LT#8 and LT#9 have been dedicated to this work. Check them out on the Films page of the LET’S TALK project website.

LET’S TALK videos produced across 2021 feature a range of young people and professionals. Across 2020 five out of six events involving schools and youth clubs took place as planned before the national lockdown. 

We published a full video report compiled via Zoom with a number of our regular panel members reflecting on all they had heard from the schools and youth club visited. See LET’S TALK Video Report 2020.

Community TV Trust [CTVT], in schools and PRUs and workshops for the disabled and marginalised, offers media training & filmmaking, engaging people and young people in open-ended creative work, linking Community to Education. Featured above is a scene from a musical drama about knife crime created by Year 9 students at Harris Academy Peckham.

Partnering CTVT in the second year of LET’S TALK were Ark Walworth Academy, Blue Elephant Theatre, Highshore School, Dulwich College, plus Surrey Square Primary School and Bede Youth Adventure Project returning for a second year.

CTVT has produced a large number of film dramas with the students at local Southwark schools, primary and secondary, and youth clubs, and shot many films including a one-hour documentary, “It’s A Cavendish Thing”, with students and staff at Cavendish School in Bermondsey.

Chris Haydon, who founded Community TV Trust in 1999, worked in broadcast TV as a director and producer, learning his trade as a documentary filmmaker on 16mm at Granada TV in Manchester.