Project Focus
Trauma-informed creative approaches with young people seeking refuge.
Supporting Themes
Co-design, trust, facilitating creative practice using multiple languages, practitioner development, trauma-informed creative spaces
About the Project
This project engaged unaccompanied asylum-seeking girls and young women through co-designed music workshops. It started with informal taster sessions and relationship-building, then the group went on to explore lyric writing, beat-making, and singing in their own languages. Sessions incorporated playful, culturally competent approaches to build confidence, trust and wellbeing.
Activities built the resilience of participants and developed music skills through culturally relevant expression and connection. Sixteen young people took part – ten female and six male – mostly aged 16–18, with thirteen identifying as African and three with a background of other Asian.
This project demonstrated how engagement with music in participants’ own languages can support emotional safety and reinforce feelings of cultural pride. It also used co-creation and informal digital spaces (e.g. WhatsApp) to support positive engagement.
Pairing experienced and emerging facilitators with lived experience and co-delivery between arts and mental health practitioners supported workforce development and enabled skills-sharing.
Wellbeing outcomes evidenced that 100% of participants reported feeling closer to others by the end of the project, with 94% saying they had more energy and felt more confident. 50% also reported feeling more relaxed and loved.
One young woman, recently arrived in the UK as an unaccompanied asylum seeker from Sudan, joined the GMYN & Music Action International project with limited English, low confidence, and no prior experience of creative activity. In early sessions, she mostly observed, quietly staying on the edge. She told facilitators she was “not good at music” and felt unsure about joining in.
The project team, made up of culturally representative and trauma-informed practitioners, used fun, informal approaches including singing games, call-and-response, and group beatmaking to create an emotionally safe space. With time and encouragement, the young woman began to participate, first through shared rhythms, then by singing in her own language.
Over the weeks, she grew in confidence and creativity, collaborating on original songwriting and performing publicly at Contact Theatre.
“When I went home last time I was singing the song we learned here!”
“It made me very happy.”
Facilitators observed a powerful transformation.
“She contributed so much. It was beautiful to see her confidence grow.”
Through co-designed, culturally grounded creative activity, the project reduced her sense of isolation, supported her cultural identity, and gave her a renewed sense of belonging.
Her journey shows growth in personal resilience, with music acting as a tool for emotional recovery, confidence, and reconnection. Her growth, from hesitant participant to co-writer and performer, also demonstrates the potential to develop skills (in this case music) whilst supporting resilience if practice is culturally grounded and accessible. Her journey echoes wider trends across the group, where all participants reported feeling closer to others, and most noted improvements in confidence and energy levels.
This project illustrates how non-clinical creative spaces, grounded in lived experience and co-created with participants, can offer powerful identity-affirming support and connection for young people from global majority communities who have experienced displacement.
