Hackney Giving Live

June 2017

In June 2017 we teamed up with Hackney Giving for another Hackney Giving Live event. After a comedy set from Hackney local, Ava Vidal, we heard from three organisations working in the area

The Huddleston Centre raised over £3,000 to pilot Huddleston Juice!, a project giving young people with disabilities work experience at a social enterprise start-up selling healthy juices in Hackney

They have set up and are currently running the juice bar and have so far trained 12 young people, taking them out in teams to markets in Hackney 

As well as being good work experience for the young people, it has been a valuable fundraising and PR opportunity for the Huddleston Centre, and they have met new people to join them as a result

With extra funding received as a result of pitching at Hackney Giving Live, the Huddleston Centre has established the Saturday Club, an incubator for the young people to develop their own ideas, such as releasing music and printing t-shirts

Element (formerly Storeys) pitched next, raising over £3,000 to run arts projects promoting the emotional wellbeing of children in care in Hackney over the summer holidays  

Changes at the school they were originally working with meant Element couldn't work with the specific group they had planned to. Instead they worked with care-leavers over a six-week project

Element worked with 10 young people on an arts project that explored purpose, motivation and creativity

Finally, Vital Xposure pitched, raising over £2,500 to train playwrights with disabilities through a programme of coaching, mentoring and staged productions at Hackney Empire

The funding enabled Vital Xposure to use an open call process to identify four emerging writers that they had not previously worked with. Vital Xposure was able to promote new writing opportunities for them to develop work for theatre

The writers received training and mentoring from professional theatre producers and draft scripts were developed in rehearsals 

One of the scripts has been commissioned to be performed as part of Vital Xposure's touring production, 'Hold the Hearse', to be toured in Spring 2019

Thanks for being a part of raising over £8,500 for 3 organisations working locally to improve lives in Hackney!