A Hurricane of Help

Fantastic news ! We have been fortunate enough to receive funding from Youth Music supported by Arts Council England to make an album for professional release. After our successful Express Yourself pilot project, we decided that the music element of the project was worth exploring further....

Greenshoots began in 2010 when Tricia Gardiner became increasingly disillusioned by the constraints to delivering an exciting, innovative curriculum in mainstream education. After 18 years experience of teaching in Secondary and Further education Tricia's ethos of challenging young people by setting targets that include live performance and producing real life outcomes has driven the company from the outset. After staging a show in front of 1200 people at Derby Assembly Rooms in 2008 which included the work of 250 young people in areas including singing, dance, rap, jazz, animation, film and a fashion show with 40 collections, whilst still teaching, Tricia decided to go it alone. Since then Ian Gardiner also left full time teaching to join the company.

Our first opportunity as a company was working with Broadway Cinema and Derbyshire County Council to stage Diverse. An initiative to bring people together from a variety of cultural backgrounds from across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to write, perform in and produce content for a show performed over 2 nights at Donut Creative Arts Studios in Chesterfield. That programme was the first of many, running for the last three years.

We have since been involved in loads of projects with young people and community groups celebrating (amongst others) Black History Month, many Heritage based projects and with lots of schools, always producing a spectacular end of project show, or, in the case of last years major project, a full length feature film, during the production of which we worked (with The Broadway cinema) with over 170 young people in 8 different schools.

We work with a range of practitioners that have lots of experience in film, fashion and performance industries. There are also opportunities for 16 year olds to experience residentials at activities centres through our work with the National Citizen Service. Check out the film of our latest one here.

Greenshoots are very proud that, up to this point having worked with approximately 700 young people, ALL of the projects that we have undertaken so far have been FREE to all participants. We work hard behind the scenes to bid for funding from a variety of sources and hope that we can always keep it that way.

We are always looking for opportunities to get involved with new and exciting projects that happen around visual and creative arts. If that's something that you would like to get involved with get in touch now!