Funding has been raised to support more filmmaking at Southwark’s Cavendish School in Bermondsey. We are delighted to continue our work with this wonderful school and its excellent young people. The current project is scheduled to run till the end of January 2017.
Author: Community TV Trust
Community Channel – funding drive
The national platform that is the Community Channel via crowdfunding has found a way forward, not least due to Sky giving 50% of the target figure of £300,000. Congratulations to Caroline Diehl and her team!
A Community Channel owned by the community offers a tantalising prospect: local media organisations together with local radio/TV stations could create a network across the country that feed a national platform as well as their own individual outlet. Campaigning anyone?
When you consider the disconnect shown by the Labour Party’s current difficulties over working with a leader whose popular mandate is not mirrored by the Parliamentary Labour Party, social media plus local broadcasting becomes a real player for change.
LET’S TALK Knife Crime Project 2019-2022
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.
CTVT’s Spectrum of Clients
CTVT has worked with schools, PRUs, local authorities, community groups, companies and corporations, with mental health, disability, ex-offenders and the marginalised.
Southwark Council
Safer Southwark Partnership
Dragon Cafe / Mental Fight Club
Sustrans
University of East London
Metropolitan Housing Trust
Community Action Network
Education In Human Values
St. Martin’s Estate
Lambeth E-Learning
Newham Young People’s Organisation
Young Parents Project
Creative Partnerships
STEP Theatre
Metropolitan Police
Southwark Pensioners Action Group
TACT Ltd
Dept of Health
Tangled Feet
South Bermondsey Partnership
Freewheelers Theatre Company
Surrey SATRO/Alcohol Awareness
Penwith DC
Cornwall Neighbourhoods For Change
Bede House
Dulwich Community Council
South London Gallery
Prendergast Vale College
Somali North East Education Trust
Lewisham PCT
SLaM NHS Trust
Cavendish School
Pelican TRA

Southwark.TV Report available for download
“An open-minded, fun and accessible community ‘TV’ service, run as a forum for debate, the supply of information and promotion of local initiatives, talent and needs, has a vital role to play in multi-cultural, multi-faith C21st century Britain. Digital/cable TV and new media will be playing their part in urban regeneration and social cohesion.”
Community TV Trust from its launch in 1999 sought ways to innovative in community media. How might engagement be achieved?
Southwark.TV – a ‘horizontal’ community project – ran from a pilot in early 2003 to 2014 when the site was archived. You can find it under the CTVT Projects menu or click HERE to read it. Once you have read the report you can also browse the Southwark.TV website from HERE
It foresaw the rise of social media and online activity, shifting away from mainstream media to portable/mobile devices and citizen journalism.