Yoga & Participatory Photography - Part 1: Visualising Young Voices

I met Ellie Firth from Umbrella Yoga at the SEYH Social Enterprise Awards in 2022 - it was an awesome night celebrating social enterprise in our region and Umbrella Yoga won start up of the year too!

As soon as I learned about their work using Yoga in community settings, I was intrigued at the possibilities - while we’re both using different mediums, ultimatley I think we’re interested in using creative ways for people to connect & express themselves.

We did indeed collaborate on a project and as I write these words to you now dear reader, we are basking in the glow of a wonderful experience working together - this is the first of two blogs sharing the results of our our work. In this blog we’ll be focussing on Yoga & Photography activities alongside 50 young people with additional needs at Kirklees College, WAVES & Shabang.

The project was funded by Barnardos and we’re really grateful to them for their support in making this project happen, and to the host partners and of course all of the wonderful young people who took part too!

I joined in a yoga session with each group early on in the project to introduce myself and then came back to another session a little further into the project and took photos of people taking part, I printed these out and brought them to a final session where we used them to prompt conversations and reflections about people’s experiences of being invovled.

After discussing the project and people’s thoughts and feelings using the photos that I’d taken, I asked people to think about some words or thoughts about the project and then asked them to take a photograph that represented that thought or reflection.

Absolutely LOVED working alongside everyone invovled in this project and to bring together images that I’ve taken and images taken by participants as a way of growing conversations and reflections was beautiful!!

I could wax lyrical all day long about this project but if you wanted to actually listen to me and Ellie waxing lyrical (for about an hour) then you can do so by listening to Episode 6 of the Our Creative Connection Podcast HERE and HERE!

It’s been a wonderful experience exploring the ways that Yoga & Photography can combine to support people to understand themselves, each other and their surroundings from different perspectives - I think we’ve just scratched the surface of what’s possible.

In part 2 I’ll share details of our work with a group of parents of children with additional needs that we ran in tandem with these activities.