The first official Youth Circus Working Group meeting took place in October, with youth circus leaders from all corners of the UK taking part in discussions.

As the UK’s youth circus umbrella, CircusWorks has been busy for a few years facilitating conversations on sector development, and asking what support the UK youth circus sector needs to thrive. With the support of CircusChange Up, we now have the opportunity to converse with the wider professional circus sector, and to hold discussions on how we can all work together to raise the profile of UK circus and show the public and powers that be what an exciting, inventive, creative, world it is.

Annabel Carberry from The Oak Circus Centre and myself facilitated the online discussion using Qiqochat, which enabled us to dedicate Zoom rooms to each of the missions. Participants visited each of the rooms, discussing the different missions and how they thought youth circus could engage with them.

We collected a lot of incredibly useful ideas for collaboration with all of the missions. There are clearly many ways in which youth circus can interact with the professional circus sector.

On this basis we made a decision that youth circus reps should be present at the other mission meetings to support connection and advocacy. We hope that this will encourage partnership projects to emerge and ensure that there is a youth circus voice in each discussion.

We also proposed that the Circus in Education Working Group should be merged with the Youth Circus Working Group. .There are lots of crossovers between these two missions, particularly in the people interested and/or working in both areas.

We will be meeting again after some of the other Working Group meetings have taken place so we can feedback on these and decide next steps. If you are interested in being part of these conversations, please get in touch via the contact form on this blog site.

Authored by Lynn Carroll