Voicing the Void
Fateful to Grateful

Film & Campaign Description

The Loughshore Stories aim to empower, enable, and encourage young people who feel voiceless, excluded, and misunderstood within the education system. Too many young people fall through the cracks of the education system and leave school with little to no qualifications. This negatively impacts young people leading to a cycle of future challenges such as reduced opportunity for employment, risk of substance misuse and poor mental health.  We seized the opportunity to amplify marginalized voices and created a collaboration with Loughshore Resource Centre. These young people had faced exclusion from mainstream education and a range of life-altering challenges, including encounters with law enforcement, paramilitary threats, suicide, family and personal mental health issues, substance abuse and violence. The project culminated in the creation of four powerful short films, capturing the collective experiences and stories of the groups involved. The young individuals serve as sources of inspiration and wisdom.

Voicing the Void

Voicing the Void is an organisation who wishes to empower, enable, and encourage groups who feel marginalised, to tell their story for personal and societal change. We believe empowering young people to use their voice and become agents of social change is crucial for building a better future. We hold outreach workshops program across organisations that engage with young people. Our workshops will cover storytelling, education around rights, social change, and wellbeing. By helping young people become more aware of their rights and teaching them storytelling as a tool for social change, we can create a more just and equitable society. We believe that by empowering young people to be changemakers, we can create a brighter future for all. 

We are dedicated to driving personal and societal change through the powerful medium of Restorative Storytelling. Our mission is to empower, enable and encourage the most marginalized groups in society to find and share their story.  In the past year, we have successfully delivered various storytelling projects and we hope to host an event to showcase the videos that now form the basis of our ongoing campaigns. Storytelling plays a pivotal role in restorative approaches, offering victims and survivors a means to reflect upon and process the challenging and traumatic events they have endured. Engaging in storytelling is a courageous and challenging process.

Our entry for this competition is a video made in collaboration with young people from Loughshore Education Centre. The project culminated in the creation of four powerful short films, capturing the collective experiences and stories of the groups involved. We seized the opportunity to amplify marginalized voices. These young people had faced exclusion from mainstream education and a range of life-altering challenges, including encounters with law enforcement, paramilitary threats, suicide, family and personal mental health issues, substance abuse and violence.  The young individuals serve as sources of inspiration and wisdom.

UN Sustainable Development Goals

We align with the following UN Sustainable Development Goals: