"I’m born and bred in Hackney. I wouldn’t say I had the best upbringing but I had fun I guess. I mean, I done a lot of stuff that I shouldn’t have done, and didn’t really want to do anything with my life. I would say that my peers were positive role models because they helped me grow up. From leaving my mum’s house it was like I felt kind of lost in the world, and they guided me and helped me to make money, and take care of myself. I look at it now and think that they weren’t so positive role models but at the time they were the only role models I had. Maybe now if I can be a role model to someone or just to help people and show them, look, I’m a prime example of you can actually do it.

          At the moment I work as a youth media worker, and I freelance as a project manager, and I volunteer as well. I also ran my own youth led project where I got funded to create a short film about dangerous dogs called Hackney Hounds. The preview screening of the film was actually really good. We had a full cinema, in fact it was overcrowded and we had people standing up. And it got talked about and got quite a lot of press coverage. At the moment, I’m enjoying doing the youth work side of it, but I would like to do a bit more film in the future. To me, I see the arts as kind of everything. It could even be some graffiti on the wall that a young person’s done on an estate - the estates are the real Hackney, you’ve got so many different people in one estate, it’s the where the mingle of cultures actually comes together. Art is everything around you, it’s how you look at things, like how you see the world really, and I feel like I don’t see the world in a standard kind of way that a lot of ‘artsy’ people do.

          People feel like, because you live in Hackney you’re destined for doom, but I love the people, it’s just so diverse. I do think there is stuff to be proud of, like I’m proud of the Hackney Empire. I went there to the Discover Young Hackney launch and they had a talent show for a load of young people. They had loads of acts there, it was absolutely amazing, and I thought they need to do more stuff like that and bring the community together. This next year for me is about really getting stuck in media - giving young people a chance to experience media how I have, and giving them the opportunity to express themselves within media. I want to help as many young people as possible, and create a pathway for the next generation. I’m having a baby this year so my child’s gonna be in the next generation in Hackney, and I want to make it a better Hackney for when my child grows up.”

“If we wanna do something and they’re trying to take opportunities away from us then we’ll just make it ourselves. I’m part of an art collective called the Greedy Anorexics. I basically try and do everything but I love illustration. I went from illustration to painting, and then digital artwork and print making. I do acting, modelling, I write poetry, I do photography, and I dabble in other stuff, like music videos. College only teaches you fine art, so I’m basically self-taught. I’ve got a short attention span so I always wanna do new things, and then if there’s signs that I can do it well I’ll keep going and try and do it better.

          Other than art I do dance. I dance for Urban Essence. My sister started it as a local group that practised in Space, the community college. It was just eight of us, then it grew into a company and now there’s sixty four. It’s mainly street dance, like breaking and popping and all that like hiphop elements, but then she mixes it in with contemporary and ballet, like she gives us training in all the areas that we would kind of need. We’ve done music videos, tours, won competitions and stuff like that, and she lets us teach the class below, and then she lets those dancers teach the class below that so we all get experience teaching.

          I love Shoreditch. It’s a lot more free than most areas that you see in Hackney, and there’s a community for street art here. If you just walk up from my house to Shoreditch High Street you’ll see eight or nine pieces by different artists. It keeps me wanting to create more. There is a rough side, like where you can kind of see it’s still Hackney. Luckily my family kept me away from it, but there’s people I went primary school with that are in prison now, just because they got involved with the wrong crowd. My sisters, they kept me busy.  Whenever they saw I was good something they made me do more of it. I never really wanted to go out, I’d rather just stay in and draw. Or my sister would come home and she’d be like, show me this move or that move and I’d wanna show them, like I wanna be good to them, so they kinda kept me off that path. Especially with dance taking me on like tours and stuff. Like you’re backstage and there’s a massive crowd and it’s like, wow. Then you get back and you see people you went to primary school with on street corners, and you’re thinking, like you haven’t really seen anything, you’re kind of stuck here, just doing the same thing. The world’s a big place, and my sisters and my brothers helped me see it and that’s really cool.

          The collective started out in August and we’ve been doing like mad amounts of work. It’s really weird because, it’s like the gallery world, they’re really unwelcoming of new artists, especially because we’re young. They’re really snooty and it’s like, ah, just move man, just let me do something. This woman from Selfridges came to our college, that does the window displays, and I was like, I wanna be in the window. So we talked to her and we convinced her and we’re booked in. That happened on a whim, but it’s simply because she’s given us the chance to do it that it’s really taking off for us. Like, I was worried about the cuts, but then I realised I wasn’t getting no money from art, I was funding myself. If they’re cutting back it doesn’t mean you have to stop. That’s why we have the collective. I think the harder artists work, the more the government might say, ok, you guys are doing something, here’s some money. But until then, you just gotta keep going, you can’t stop.

"I’ve been looking after my family since I was born. My mum had three, four jobs at the same time so I had to take care of my sisters. But I don’t have to do it anymore because my mum’s fairly alright. It’s fun because I’m the oldest, but there’s a bit of pressure on me because I have to make my future very successful. I don’t think my parents wanted me to look after them, but it’s a thing where after a while it just gets so, like there’s no money. My mum, she didn’t get to go university because she studied in Nigeria, and my dad as well. I don’t think a lot of kids get influenced into going to uni and stuff. I look at the pros and cons, like I know if I go uni I’m going to make a ton of money. And just the perspective of my parents, like they tell me, if you go uni you’ll have a great life, buy a nice fancy car, live in a nice fancy house and pay the mortgage. So yeah, I think those are probably the things that really influence me to go work hard.

          I just finished my funding bid for a movie I want to make that kind of tells young people what options they have if they want to go university. With the tuition fees or the EMA being cut and all that stuff, people don’t realise that you only have to pay for it after you finish university. I hope this short film will attract a lot of young people and let them realise that it’s not, you know, just doing crimes and stuff and trying to make money just to go to uni, it’s not the only way. Like there’s tons of ways of getting to your dream job.

          When I got referred to YH World I was supposed to do nine hours but I enjoyed it so much I started doing more. It was just meeting new people, I realised you don’t really need to cause crimes and stuff. I don’t really remember why I started doing crimes in the first place. I don’t think I had a purpose actually. But now after uni, I’ll get a job and I’ll start my own business. But even if I’m a millionaire I’m still going to be working at YH World, I enjoy it that much. I’m volunteering there now, doing journalism and editing videos and stuff like that, which is great. And at home I’m doing great, doing good with my studies. There should be more stuff for young people and that, there should be less crime. I don’t think young people are motivated to do like more positive stuff. Most of the crime is made by young people and if there was more jobs for them it would be much better.

          Everyone would like to come to Hackney, it’s just that fear of crime. But it’s not as bad as they think about it. I like it because it’s really diverse. I like London Fields. The good parts, the places where you see a lot of people from, even outside London. If it was my area, you won’t find nothing. People refrain from coming to my area which is not good. It’s just full of people that want to take over your life and mess with you. I want to get out of there as soon as possible. That’s one of the reasons I want to go to uni. I want to move to the City to be honest. It’s one place I know I can chill, and be myself. No one troubles, there’s no one looking at you as you’re walking down the road, like what’s he doing here. Everyone’s allowed in the City. If there’s somewhere nice in the future in Hackney then I will stay, but if not, then I won’t. But I hope there is."

“I was brought up in Bow and in Hammersmith. We moved around London a lot – my family was a bit all over the place like that. Now, I live in Hackney. I first came to Hackney with my Mum when I was 11. She worked for the Spitalfields Trust and she’d raid Hugenot houses that had been closed to the public, going through them and finding all these artefacts in curiosity cabinets. The kinds of things that are in the Geoffrey Museum and Sutton House now. I’ve just finished a Foundation at the Slade. It was very fine arty, very hyper-critical and inward looking. It's very important for me to work with something more powerful than that I can control. Serendipity, about catalysing my interests in the way that out of something comes something else. I’m not particularly good at schmoozing, but I love bringing people together – I get really excitable thinking about how things could work. I’ve done a lot of work with advertising and I spent some time with BBH – Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty. They make really beautiful adverts by discovering fascinating social insights around the world, which makes the advert stronger. I met BBH through a course at The Roundhouse, we looked at lags in the market and what people need to make their life easier.  I learnt how to communicate professionally.

          So now I’m working with BBH to develop an app called ‘Charity Shops’. I wanted to revolutionize charity shopping; encouraging more young people to shop in them will celebrate them more– to show people where they are. Bringing them up to speed with technology, giving the public an incentive to find their local charity shop. I go into the studio about twice a month where I act as the young person in the room. They find my insights interesting, relevant or sometimes not at all. The charity app is something I came up with to fill a need, a really positive thing that ad agencies can do. I’ve just painted for three months at the Slade which I’ve loved but I actually find liaising with people much more interesting.

          Pamphlet is the project I’m working on now in partnership with Kezia [Levitas]. I’m super excited about it. It’s about getting people to engage with things that they otherwise wouldn’t engage with. The idea that you could have a billboard that isn’t selling anything but is there purely for aesthetic reasons. It’s refreshing, it’s hedonistic. It’s collaboration between the community, artists and maybe local businesses to engage with everyone on one platform. So someone might nominate a wall space, which would be the brief for the artist to create something in keeping with that area. So it could be, like, 12 unused spaces working under a theme like patterns or the word ‘vicious’. We’ve been meeting designers and discussing potential possibilities. I’m not particularly interested in the Olympics and I don’t believe anyone is that engaged with them, so it could be this mysterious thing. This billboard that goes up around that time advertising nothing.

          I’ve also been involved with [social enterprise funders] Live UnLtd as part of their judging panel, they offer some wonderful opportunities to shape young peoples' ideas. I adore reading the applications that come through.I guess I’m at the beginning of my career now, the last few months was really about finding my ropes. I spent the last year painting, creating and making and I’m now lucky enough to feel I know where I want to go."

"I just take pictures of what interests me, or inspires me. Something that’s not boring – not what you see every day. Like what happens only once in a lifetime.

          I started taking pictures when I was twelve, because my uncle introduced me to the first camera ever built. He’s not a photographer but he collects them. Apparently they’re worth a fortune but I don’t believe him, because if they were a fortune he’d sell them. That camera it actually still works, but he gave me a disposable camera at first, and he liked the shots so then he got me a Polaroid. I took pictures of buildings and people. I took pictures of people but they never knew, and stuff like that. Then I started taking pictures with Headliners, then I went to Discover Young Hackney, and then I came with YH World. It’s really good, because I get to do a lot more than just take pictures, I get to explore more and understand what photography is. I’m excited to work with Agenda, especially the pictures that I’ve seen. Like I want to learn how he manipulates them. I haven’t really learnt anything from anybody so this will be the first time.

          It’s hard to say the difference between a good picture and a bad picture. Because even if it looks bad it can still be a good picture. I think I see things a lot differently to other people. You know, like a puffed up ball – they think it’s just a ball, but when I take a picture of it they think it’s something else. I like Nick Knight’s pictures. He’s done pictures of Lady Gaga, and Cheryl Cole, which I’d like to do. I want my pictures to tell a story, like I don’t want it to be not meaningful. Even though some of them are mostly random, you can still make a story out of them. I go all about, like I travel a lot. I go loads of places far away from Hackney and then come back. It’s like going to search the world and then coming back to where I started from.

          But my mum doesn’t always let me go by myself because she’s scared that, especially with Hackney, people might steal the camera. She’s very protective. But I think she’s right. I haven’t got into trouble before, I’ve walked around with my camera but it’s hidden in my bag. I don’t know why Hackney is like that, I don’t really put a label on it. Like I understand where it’s coming from, I’ve experienced some of the crime and stuff like that. But even though people stereotype it it’s not actually what they think it is. If they actually stay here for a long time then they’d notice that there actually are good stuff. There’s lots of activities, lots of chances to get out there. And I feel kind of safe because everyone in our block knows me, and they’re almost all my friends.

          But I doubt that I’ll stay here. I joke around with my mum that when I’m eighteen I’ll go live in India. I don’t know why, especially when I don’t know that language, but something tells me to go far far away. I’ve got the right to go anywhere, so I can take myself somewhere where they’ll never find me again, no one knows me and I can wear whatever I want, like big five, ten inch heels, something like that. And I would take photographs, it would be like a new identity.”

"I’ve been looking after my family since I was born. My mum had three, four jobs at the same time so I had to take care of my sisters. But I don’t have to do it anymore because my mum’s fairly alright. It’s fun because I’m the oldest, but there’s a bit of pressure on me because I have to make my future very successful. I don’t think my parents wanted me to look after them, but it’s a thing where after a while it just gets so, like there’s no money. My mum, she didn’t get to go university because she studied in Nigeria, and my dad as well. I don’t think a lot of kids get influenced into going to uni and stuff. I look at the pros and cons, like I know if I go uni I’m going to make a ton of money. And just the perspective of my parents, like they tell me, if you go uni you’ll have a great life, buy a nice fancy car, live in a nice fancy house and pay the mortgage. So yeah, I think those are probably the things that really influence me to go work hard.

          I just finished my funding bid for a movie I want to make that kind of tells young people what options they have if they want to go university. With the tuition fees or the EMA being cut and all that stuff, people don’t realise that you only have to pay for it after you finish university. I hope this short film will attract a lot of young people and let them realise that it’s not, you know, just doing crimes and stuff and trying to make money just to go to uni, it’s not the only way. Like there’s tons of ways of getting to your dream job.

          When I got referred to YH World I was supposed to do nine hours but I enjoyed it so much I started doing more. It was just meeting new people, I realised you don’t really need to cause crimes and stuff. I don’t really remember why I started doing crimes in the first place. I don’t think I had a purpose actually. But now after uni, I’ll get a job and I’ll start my own business. But even if I’m a millionaire I’m still going to be working at YH World, I enjoy it that much. I’m volunteering there now, doing journalism and editing videos and stuff like that, which is great. And at home I’m doing great, doing good with my studies. There should be more stuff for young people and that, there should be less crime. I don’t think young people are motivated to do like more positive stuff. Most of the crime is made by young people and if there was more jobs for them it would be much better.

          Everyone would like to come to Hackney, it’s just that fear of crime. But it’s not as bad as they think about it. I like it because it’s really diverse. I like London Fields. The good parts, the places where you see a lot of people from, even outside London. If it was my area, you won’t find nothing. People refrain from coming to my area which is not good. It’s just full of people that want to take over your life and mess with you. I want to get out of there as soon as possible. That’s one of the reasons I want to go to uni. I want to move to the City to be honest. It’s one place I know I can chill, and be myself. No one troubles, there’s no one looking at you as you’re walking down the road, like what’s he doing here. Everyone’s allowed in the City. If there’s somewhere nice in the future in Hackney then I will stay, but if not, then I won’t. But I hope there is."