Freestylin' - Talking to Freestyle Bristol founder Delroy Hibbert

Delroy Hibbert, founder and MD of Freestyle Bristol

In March 2020, like everyone else around the world, it seemed to me that life stopped as the pandemic forced me to enter into the now-familiar stasis of isolation. Welcome to the new normal!

The history graduate in me quickly updated my knowledge on the Spanish Flu pandemic and I knew we were in for the long haul. I would go on to win a £20 bet with a friend who assured me this would all be over in a month, which proved to be one of the few positives at the time, as I found myself under virtual house arrest.

At first lockdown was great … well, bearable. The weather was hot, I watched pandemic films on Netflix to cheer myself up and got caught up in the modern version of the wartime spirit with Zoom quizzes and kitchen discos replacing nights out. Soon however the dark side started creeping in as social isolation became monotonous. It wasn’t just me that began struggling, I soon realised.

Through talking online with other youth professionals and parents I knew I became aware of the negative effects that the pandemic and lockdown were having on younger members of society through social isolation, loss of routine and the disruption to education, support and employment.

Even before the pandemic I had been anxious about a post-Brexit society; lockdown increased my concerns and left me wondering what I could do, if anything, about them. However, a chance meeting one day with a young man I had mentored made me realise I had to do something, as in a brief conversation he told me how he was also struggling with lockdown psychologically as well as trying to complete his A-Level coursework without access to a computer. It was these issues that caused me to make the big decision in my life that would lead me to giving up my job and deciding to work full time supporting young people.

The other seismic event to happen last year that resonated with me was the resurgence of activism worldwide under the banner of Black Lives Matter. The images of young people in Bristol marching and then later some of them pulling down the statue of Colston were powerful ones. Like many others, I felt that changes were needed in society and that we needed to build a legacy based on the actions of what happened that day and continued to happen around the country.

One of the issues I focused on at the time was the media coverage of the events and how they scrambled to find voices (including mine!) to interview about the events to help their audiences make sense of what they were seeing. This was followed by campaigns that sought to cover the wider issues; special BLM editions, book recommendations from Black social commentators and a whole host of rushed virtue-signalling embracing the cause, before dropping it once the news story had moved on.

This again emphasised the lack of diversity in the media; something I have been concerned about for a long time. It occurred to me that I needed to do something in this area and an idea began to form around working with young people on media projects which would offer them training and support as well as giving them a voice to address the issues they were concerned about.

It was a great idea but I didn’t have a clue about where to start with this! I decided it should be web-based to counter the issue of not being able to engage with young people face to face due to covid. Being a bit disorganised I decided at Christmas to register the domain www.freestylebristol.com without knowing how I would use it, but feeling this was a good idea. Fortunately, while still trying to work out where this was taking me, I received the opportunity and some initial funding from Avon & Somerset Police to create an online media project with the idea that I would create an online portal to provide information addressing social isolation and provide career & educational opportunities and other content aimed at young people aged 16-30.

Things were happening, and through word of mouth I managed to recruit a group of young volunteers to work on the project. To do this I decided I would support the volunteers to create the website from scratch and they would have creative input into all aspects of the project; from the branding to the content and then marketing.

A lesson I quickly learned was to give them complete control of some aspects. In the early stages I sat in online meetings with a very patient graphic designer coming up with branding ideas for the website based on what I confidently thought was my ability to connect with young people. I produced the initial ideas only to have them rejected as ‘a bit old school’; a term I usually consider positive when applied to hip-hop or fashion, but which I realised in this case meant I was effectively sacked as the project's branding guru.

I scrapped my ideas and arranged a meeting with the young people and the graphic designer and together they came up with the design brief. I am proud to say that they then went on to use this brief and their graphic skills to design and build the website we are currently using, and it looks a lot better than my original vision!

Working with them proved to be fun, despite the online challenges, and we soon formed a strong team with ideas bouncing off each other in meetings. We quickly realised this had the possibility of being more than a one off project and we should widen the content narrative to include other topics of interest to a young audience including the arts & creativity, sports and cultural life in Bristol.

I also started the process of registering a Community Interest Company, turning the project into a permanent organisation that would produce as its primary function a website that would continue to be created and aimed at young people in Bristol.

We decided to include video and photography so we could capture stories using a variety of media. We used social media to connect with young creatives and potential contributors in the city. Slowly but surely we started to shape Freestyle Bristol as it is now.

I’m not going to lie, we’ve had our challenges, especially as we had very little experience between us, but the enthusiasm of the team got us through. On one occasion we recorded a filmed interview with event organisers Output Promotions. Louise, a student who had originally approached me looking for work experience, was thrust into the role of presenter on the morning of the shoot despite having never spoken on camera before, but took to it well, with just a few nerves, and impressed the whole team with her delivery. It was all a bit punk and D.I.Y. as those who had no experience professionally were suddenly writing articles, creating photoshoots or helping with the productions. Even my partner got involved and ran a workshop one Saturday afternoon on carrying out interviews.

By April we were ready to launch the website and run a social media campaign to do so. We began to pick up followers and connect with other potential team members as people began to discover us.

I’ll be honest, like any group of people we have had our disagreements but we’ve resolved them thanks to having an amazing and supportive team. We have also had bad luck in recently organising our first fundraising event and then having to cancel it as we realised it was due to occur on the same night as a nationwide boycott had been called in response to the recent incidents of spiking in clubs, and we wanted to show solidarity with this action.

In the last six months we have lost a couple of members of the original team as the end of lockdown and furloughs drew them back to full time jobs they had before they joined us, although the door always remains open to their involvement.

Joy from Freestyle Bristol presenting with a guest.

But we have also gained some fantastic new people and continue to grow as an organisation, with the introduction of a weekly open access youth project aimed at 16-21 year olds now being delivered from Docklands Community Centre in St Pauls. Here we are delivering creative & media workshops aimed at giving those interested in gaining the necessary skills to contribute content for our website or their own projects. These are delivered on Thursday evenings and will include writing workshops in November aimed at those who wish to write news or lifestyle features and will be taught by journalists from Bristol Live. We will also have an Introduction to Podcasting workshop with Neil Maggs, the presenter of the successful Bristol Unplugged podcast, coming up in December. These workshops will be free to all participants.

On that note we have also taken recent steps into podcasting ourselves and have a team of volunteers producing new podcasts and are currently working with a number of young people who want to present their own via our platforms.

These are exciting times and we are still in our first year and looking to work with more young people and grow our team. If you are aged 16-30 years old, have pre-existing material you want to promote or have an idea for a new piece of creative or non-creative writing please get in contact with us here. If you are interested but still have some questions please email info@freestylebristol.com.