This week we welcome Rachel McKail from MAC-UK and Katy Dawe and Shakira Henry from Art Against Knives (AAK). AAK are a London based organisation that intervene early to help young people to embed creative spaces in London’s most isolated communities, co-designed with young people, that build on their strengths and create opportunity.

Rachel is a Clinical Psychologist, who is MAC-UKs lead for the Trusted Relationships project, which is in partnership with AAK. Rachel reflects that within Clinical Psychology we talk a lot about social inequality, prevention and co-production and wonders if sometimes as a profession we find it hard to say we don’t really know what we are doing with this work. Rachel says that to do community work as Clinical Psychologists, we need to work alongside the incredible people who’ve been doing this work for decades and who are already pushing for change.

Rachel explains that Community Psychology is very important to her, and that the best part of her job is working with AAK, who she says inject so much energy, love and care into the work that they do. Rachel describes that at AAK, co-production is weaved into the fabric of everything they do and that she learns so much from working with them.

Shakira has worked at AAK for five years, she has had various different roles with the charity and is currently a Programme Manager. Shakira describes AAK as a hardworking collective and a phenomenal charity who do what they say on the tin: keeping young people at the forefront of everything that they do. Shakira says that working alongside MAC-UK has enabled spaces for the team to learn, enhance their understanding and develop.

Katy is the founder of the charity AAK, established in 2010 in response to the stabbing of her best friend Oliver Hemsley. Katy described that when listening to young people and their communities to understand what could be done, it became very clear that nobody was asking young people; just making decisions for them. So the charity was built on the value co-production. From the start, young people were put in the lead of the intervention, investing in their ideas and supporting them in driving their own solutions. Katy recently left the charity having run it for 10 years and the charity has welcomed a new CEO Dr Sally Zlotowitz who joined us on the Discovering Community podcast earlier this year.

In this week’s episode Rachel, Katy and Shakira talk about their work together through the Trusted Relationships Programme. A 4-year partnership between AAK, MAC-UK, 0a Local Authority, to reduce the risk of criminal and sexual exploitation. Using AAK’s model of creative spaces to establish trusted relationships with young people, and utilising these to connect then with the systems around them at a pace, and in a space that works for them. Championing systems to do things differently, MAC-UK’s role is to support the embedding of psychologically informed environments, co-production and the MAC-UK INTEGRATE model.

AAK and MAC-UK came together, when AAK decided to take a community-based approach in Barnet recognising the need there. AAK began spending time with young people, hanging out, painting their nails and getting to know a group of young women from one estate. Those young women told AAK that they wanted to open a nail shop and helped shape the values of AAK today.

Art Against Knives: https://www.artagainstknives.com Twitter: @ArtAgainstKnive Instagram: artagainstknives dollisdollsnails nw9nails the_labaak 

Creative spaces at AAK on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d08D34qOXK4 

Listen in to the ‘One Mic Real Talk’ podcast:  https://shows.acast.com/one-mic-real-talk

Find out more about MAC-UK: https://mac-uk.org Twitter: @macukcharity