Bow School students painted a huge colourful mural outside their school - an androgynous face reflecting planet Earth in its eyes, sending its message to the delegates of COP 26.

The new mural is the result of a series of workshops hosted by social justice and street art project, Paint the Change. The climate and ecological crisis is an urgent concern for the workshop participants who wanted to communicate this to delegates preparing for the November 2021 UN Climate Change Conference.

After a year in lockdown, the workshops led by street artist, ATMA and youth mentor, Efe Ezekiel, gave the students not only the chance to talk about their concerns about the local environment, but also helped process a wide-range of issues concerning them.

The workshops enabled the young people to talk openly about diversity and racism, their mental health and crime, and how to save the turtles. Students were encouraged to draw their feelings and express their emotions in a visual way resulting in a wide array of images and designs.

Bow School Filmmaking Workshop

As a follow-up to the Earth Day project, Bow School called Paint tthe Change back for an art and filmmaking workshop centering around the school’s core values: determination, adaptability, curiosity and respect.

Year 10 students from Bow School in Tower Hamlets, London, joined Paint the Change to design a mural for their school atrium during five two-hour workshops. They wanted to share their school values with future Bow students. Street artist Atma led the first creative session in which the participants described what their school values meant to them and how they would represent them visually, before combining their ideas into a final mural design.

The second part of the workshop focused on filmmaking. The students were taught the basics of visual storytelling, camera angles and interview procedures. They were encouraged to film Atma as he painted the school mural and to interview him about the process, receiving feedback on their shots and interview footage throughout the session.

“We filmed interviews with Matt who is the painter, and we learned how to make the film fun and engaging,” says Ahmed, Year 10.

The final part of the workshop was dedicated to editing, in which the students made a final film in groups of two. The participants selected their favourite clips and structured their own paper-edit before assembling a rough-cut on iMovie.

Dreaming of the future through art: Paint the Change goes to Bow School

Paint the Change teamed up with street artist Hanna Benihoud and youth mentor Efe Ezekiel to host a new youth workshop at Bow School in East London – and to produce our latest London mural. Year 7 and Year 8 students – ages 11 to 13 – explored their dreams for life and career aspirations over five two-hour sessions that featured group discussions and artistic activities to develop powers of self-expression.

Maziar Bahari, the founder of Paint the Change, said it was "an “honour and a pleasure” to produce the workshops and mural with Bow School. “The students are thoughtful and enthusiastic and the teachers have an inspiring sense of mission. It’s a privilege for Paint the Change to become a part of the Bow community. We’re so happy that these workshops and murals have helped the students at Bow to visualise not only their own futures but the futures they want for their communities.”

Street artist Benihoud led the workshop in their creative activities. Participants were encouraged to use art to make mind maps to visualise their futures and dream jobs, using drawing, stencils and 3D models. Group discussions on how to positively contribute to local communities, how to cultivate creative spaces, as well as major social issues such as climate change and inequality, fed into a collective vision for a mural that was later installed at Bow School. Benihoud then used the ideas and contributions of the workshop to produce the mural alongside the participants.

“Using the disciplines of art and creativity, the students were able to expand their minds, their talents, and their visions of their future, which was fantastic and an inspiration,” said Ezekiel, who has worked with Paint the Change since 2020 to run workshops for dozens of young people across London. The workshop also featured a portrait-drawing exercise in which participants drew portraits of themselves, and each other, “so that they could have a beautiful understanding of how identity is important,” she added.

Anna Rawles, Bow School’s Art and Design Technology teacher, said that the workshops gave participants “a chance to realise some of the things that maybe they’d kept in their heads, talk about them and talk to adults as well as their peers about where they see their futures,” adding that it was a “wonderful experience” to work with Paint the Change. And Hoda Mohamud, the school’s Careers & Transitions Coordinator, said the students had “gained numerous skills, from soft skills to creativity, they learnt about public speaking, they had to be able to present their ideas … it was good to have those conversations starting now to help them have a focus when they start the new academic year.”