For Communities
Give it over to your young people: their words, their stage, their moment
“A life-changing weekend.”
Rebecca Abbot, Creative Producer for Suffolk Libraries at Word Cup 2023
Working with professional performance poets and trained poet educators, our joyful shows, workshops and festivals empower children and young people to discover their voice.
Our poets don’t just work with young people in schools and libraries. Poets can transform the space, wherever you are. We deliver workshops for a wide range of youth groups outside of school, such as at youth centres and as part of looked-after children programmes. We also offer one-off poetry performances and live events at community events and festivals designed for young audiences. For many, it is their first experience of high-quality arts and live performance.
Performance poetry is a powerful creative act that is proven to build pride, self-belief and aspirations, strengthen wellbeing and learning.
Our poets often come from diverse backgrounds and provide relatable role models for children who may feel that the world of poetry is not for them. They are skilled in transforming children’s relationship to words by helping each child explore their own stories and find their voice.
Why performance poetry?
- Belonging
- Connection
- Creativity
- Confidence
- Building community
“I don’t know. I’m just lost for words. These guys took them all. It was amazing.”
Riz Ahmed, Judge, Word Cup 2010
What we offer
Live performances like our SPIN poetry gigs, workshops, performances and commissions through our Book a Poet service, our work with libraries and Word Cup, our national showcase performance poetry slam for young people aged 13-16, which takes place every four years during the FIFA World Cup.
Our approach
We foreground Black British and Global Majority Poets. Our poets are real-world, relatable role models often from inner-city backgrounds. They are skilled in developing writing and speaking skills, with many blending music, rap and storytelling.
We work with professional poets and trained poet educators.
All our poets are highly skilled and trained in working with young people. Many, such as Joseph Coelho, have international reputations. We run training sessions for our poets to support them in delivering our programmes.
We mix it up. Many of our poets work across art forms, blending rap, music, movement and dance, storytelling and theatre techniques. For your young people, it is active, fun and empowering.
Testimony
A recent project we took part in saw Adam Kammerling using his approach to working with young people as a poet educator on our Lewisham Looked After Children project in 2025.
“In this particular group, there was a high percentage of Care Experienced students managing low literacy levels that are common with interrupted education and high levels of trauma. I realised that many of the students had complex relationships to their handwriting, or spelling, or met insurmountable difficulty shaping words on a page, or even a laptop. I began exploring new approaches to creative writing. I developed simple art exercises that I could direct with poetry prompts. I found visual art tasks that I could interrogate to create poems. I started to incorporate these new approaches and found students were less explosive, more engaged; it was working.”
Adam Kammerling, award winning poet, theatre maker and educator
Insert HTML here