Entrepreneurial social housing tenants in Sheffield are being encouraged to set up their own businesses through the Locally Grown initiative.
Places for People, in partnership with four other Yorkshire housing associations and a local regeneration charity Participate Projects has won £1.5m of funding from the European Regional Development Fund to assist business start-ups until July 2015.
The scheme offers tailored support for social housing residents who want to set up their own businesses, and advice for any existing small business in the area.
Places for People has already helped up to ten businesses in Leeds through Locally Grown since it launched in August this year, and is now hoping to emulate that success in Sheffield.
It aims to establish 15-17 new businesses and support a further 30 across the city over the next two years.
The support on offer ranges from business plans and advice on accessing finance, to marketing strategies, legal support and basic book-keeping.
But, often, it is simply about giving people a helping hand.
Matthew Hesketh, Business Enabler for Locally Grown said: “A lot of people struggle with I.T, but they also struggle with filling in forms and confidence to ring people up.
“Much of it is about breaking down barriers and assisting people. Some people don’t have that get up and go and confidence just to go out and talk to people.
“It really helps people to come out of their shell.”
One Sheffield company who have already benefited from Locally Grown is Pure Tech Plumbing Services, who are one of the scheme’s business assists.
Chris Hobbs, 27, set up the business last year after working for another plumbing firm since the age of 16.
“I joined the Locally Grown project a while ago and have been to a few of their sessions. Probably the most useful thing has been someone to go through your ideas and see them from another angle. Sometimes you get lost in your own approach.
“Matt [Hesketh] has also looked over some of my marketing material and helped raise my profile in the newsletter.
“It’s been good to just be able to speak to someone, it can often be a scary place setting up on your own.
“I think like any business it was slow to start with but things have picked up and I’m pretty busy now.”
Voices of the Holocaust, a new theatre and education company, performed its latest show Fragile Fire at the Library Theatre in Sheffield on 4th December.
Fragile Fire tells the story of Mordechai Anielewicz, one of the chief figures of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, who kept the invading Nazis at bay for a month in 1943.
The group is touring with Sheffield resident Shonaleigh, who is thought to be the only remaining Drut’syla in the world, a traditional Yiddish storyteller. The play is paired with one of Shonaleigh’s stories, The Fool of the Warsaw Ghetto, which was created by her grandmother in Auschwitz.
Her grandmother survived the death camp and came to live with Shonaleigh in Britain, where she began to teach her the tradition from the age of four. Shonaleigh holds around 4,500 stories in her head, and now travels around the world telling. She is also Associate Lecturer in Storytelling at the University of Derby.
Shonaleigh said: “It is a huge reportoire of folktales, wonder tales, legends, myths, traditionally passed down from the grandmother to the granddaughter. It worked within a community, you told these stories, they promoted debate and enlightenment.”
A Drut’syla would historically be embedded within a small Jewish community, but their numbers began to diminish after the first world war, and they barely existed following the second.
“The first people into the gas chambers were the old people and the children so it pretty much wiped out the tradition.”
Shonaleigh is working with three universities to record her stories, and is beginning to teach them to her 16-year-old son.
Voices of the Holocaust was formed on Holocaust Memorial Day earlier this year, and is the only specialist group of its type in the country, teaching the Holocaust through theatre and performance.
Cate Hibbert, Voices of the Holocaust’s founder and creative director said: “What we do is create historically accurate narratives by using theatre in the most beautiful and stunning visual and aural styles you can imagine.”
Although Cate is passionate about theatre, she believes there is a fundamental problem with the way the Holocaust is being taught to children, and wants to take Voices into schools.
“We’ve only existed for a few months and we’ve had to work flat out as volunteers. We had to set this up from nothing. People didn’t really see that there was a need but there is a need and it’s massive.
“For 70 years the Jews have been represented as a people who went like lambs to the slaughter, that they didn’t fight back or resist. Well that’s not true.”
Although still in its infancy, Voices has been winning support from politicians, and attended an event in parliament earlier this year. Local MPs in its performing cities attend the shows and have been moved by what they have seen.
Iain Stewart, MP for Milton Keynes South, where Voices have their headquarters, said: “I think that the work of Voices of the Holocaust is a very effective way of bringing the reality of the Holocaust into the curriculum for students.
“As time goes on fewer and fewer survivors of the Holocaust will be left to tell their stories firsthand. These need to be kept alive to remind, and educate, future generations about the possible consequences of intolerance.”
Amy Casbolt, fundraising co-ordinator at Roundabout
A Sheffield charity has launched an online appeal to raise the £10,000 it needs to renovate flats for young homeless people.
Roundabout is asking people to invest directly in the project through a six-week crowfunding campaign. Those who donate can then track the progress of the appeal online.
It is hoping that this innovative new way of raising funds will enable it to provide a much-needed facelift for its eight flats on St Barnabas’ Road.
‘Extremely run down’
Amy Casbolt, fundraising co-ordinator for Roundabout said: “They’re extremely run down. There’s not much furniture in there, they need painting, the heating system is terrible and they’re really not nice.”
The flats are next-door to Roundabout’s Emergency Access Hostel, the only one in Sheffield to take in 16 and 17 year olds. Young people typically stay there for six weeks before moving into the flats, where they can stay for up to a year.
The hostel last year underwent a huge £1m refurbishment to provide more bedrooms for residents and training space for Roundabout staff, who help those staying to claim appropriate benefits and plan for life after they move out.
Casbolt said: “It’s been really nice to see the impact that’s had on the young people.
“But it’s always been an incentive for people in the hostel that if you work with us, you can then move onto the flats next door, and they’re thinking why would I want to go there when it’s really nice in here?”
The hostel refurbishment was completed with £700,000 of financial support from South Yorkshire Housing Association, but there wasn’t enough money remaining for the adjoining flats.
Increasing demand
Roundabout’s funding model has had to change in response to reduced Government assistance through the Supporting People programme, and demand for its services is increasing. It currently has to turn away 25 people a week.
Casbolt says this is driving the move towards new and less traditional forms of investment, like the crowdfund.
“I don’t think people realise what’s happening on their own doorstep. We support 150 young people every single day in Sheffield.
“We can’t do it without the support of local people. We desperately need people to donate – even £5 or whatever people can spare.
“Everyone who donates is helping to provide a safe place for young homeless people in Sheffield.”
It almost could have been just any average day at Sheffield railway station, with hordes of confused passengers anxiously checking the departures board to see when they would be on their way. It was only the short trousers and German accents that gave it away. Rather than embark to another city in the UK, on 16th November bewildered Sheffield commuters were instead transported back to 1938 for a theatre production to mark the 75th anniversary of the Kindertransport.
In November of that year, Britain allowed 10,000 unaccompanied children, mainly Jewish, to arrive from areas of Nazi-occupied Europe as their antisemitic policies began to be take hold.
The Kinder, who were told to arrive with just one suitcase, travelled by train from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to the Hook of Holland, where they got on boats to Harwich.
From there, children were sent to homes all over the country.
Suitcase
One of these Kinder was Johanna Hacker, who arrived from Vienna with her two younger sisters in December 1938, before settling in Sunderland. Her 9 month-old baby brother Max was too young to travel, and was lost his life in the Holocaust with Johanna’s parents.
70 years on, Johanna’s daughters Ros and Jane Merkin, with their cousin, musical director Max Reinhardt, created the play Suitcase to commemorate the journey that their mother and thousands of other children made.
Jane said: “Kindertransport has been a really important part of our lives. Our mum, who died in 1994, didn’t talk about it a lot, but we grew up knowing that story.”
Originally devised as a one-off show at Liverpool Street Station in 2008, the play is now touring ten railway stations across the country to mark the 75th anniversary.
Suitcase is performed as a piece of on-site promenade theatre. Audience members are led around the station by volunteers – or ‘organisers’, taking the role of members of the Refugee Children’s Movement who helped to facilitate the arrivals.
Amidst the din of a busy station and constant announcements over the loudspeaker, the audience take the role of the Kinder. Along their journey they are confronted by angry foster parents sent a girl rather than the boy they’d hoped for, a patriotic railway worker inspired by a political speech and a bigoted woman who worries the children will spread diseases.
Ros said: “We wanted to look at what’s the closest we could get to the experience that the Kinder might have had when they arrived.
“What does it feel like when the woman who doesn’t want the kids here talks to you as though you’re that person?”
The cast of Suitcase entertaining the audience at Sheffield railway station (image courtesy of Suitcase)
One member of the audience didn’t have to try too hard to imagine what that must have been like.
Susanne Pearson, nee Ehrmann was born in 1928 in a small town near Ostrava in then Czechoslovakia, before moving to Prague at the age of four.
Sue is now 85, and lives in a bungalow in Hunters Bar with her husband of 67 years, Harry. Speaking with a strong Sheffield accent, there are few clues to her past, although she remembers it vividly.
“I was an only child and had quite a privileged childhood with a lot of sport and a lot of music.”
Although conditions didn’t at home deteriorate whilst Sue was there, people’s attitudes started to change as the Nazis advanced on Prague.
“I can remember being told not to talk to strangers and, being Jewish, people started to restrict their own activity.”
‘Saved my life’
Sue was a member of the Red Falcons, a left-wing youth organisation that had links with the Woodcraft Folk in England. Although Susanne was too young, other members of the Red Falcons had attended a summer camp in England in 1938.
“Quite a few of the Red Falcons were Jews…so when Prague became occupied [in 1939], the Woodcraft Folk people here realised that quite a number of the people they had got to know at this camp were in danger.
“So they wrote letters to its members saying, what can we do?”
Around 20 families offered homes to these young children, so the head of the Woodcraft Folk approached Nicholas Winton, a British businessman and humanitarian who was organising the rescue of Jewish children from Czechoslovakia. Winton agreed that the organisation could choose which children it wanted to offer homes to.
“It was that really that got me here and saved my life.”
Sue travelled with around 15 other children from Czechoslovakia, and she was sent to Beauchief in Sheffield, where she lived with her foster family for five years.
Initially, Sue communicated with her adopted family in German, as she spoke little English. But she was keen to fit in with local children.
“I didn’t want to be different. I learnt to speak English very quickly, and I learnt it with a Sheffield accent which I’ve still got. By the New Year you couldn’t have picked me out.”
Sue briefly attended primary school, before being sent to the local “sink school” until leaving at 14. She was 17 by the time the war ended, and had began working as a nurse.
Despite adapting quickly, she was often homesick.
“Oh yes, horrendously. The bit they got so right in Suitcase was the parents telling the children ‘you’ll go and we’ll follow’.”
But she never saw her parents again.
“They were taken to Lodz ghetto in 1942. My Dad died there the following year.
“I do not know what happened to my mother.
“I think, because there is no trace of her, that she must have lived for quite a long time after. The Germans were very meticulous in keeping records.
“The date of death of my father is quite clear.”
Sue’s experience was not uncommon. 63% of the Kinder never saw their parents again, murdered in the Nazi ghettos and concentration camps.
The cast of Suitcase entertaining the audience at Sheffield railway station (image courtesy of Suitcase)
Ros Merkin said: “A lot of the Kinder never spoke about what happened to them.
“For a lot of them there’s a trauma that’s been hidden, but as they’ve got older there’s a sense that you can…or you need to or you want to tell that story.
“There’s also a sense of running out of time.”
Sue has stayed in Sheffield. She and Harry had two children, adopted another and also fostered, and she is now a great-grandmother to three young children. She later went back to school to study O-levels, and became a teacher, rising to head before going on to lecture in Early Years Learning at Sheffield Polytechnic.
But it took her until 1970, 25 years after the end of the war to be able to travel back to Czechoslovakia. She also got back in touch with one remaining cousin, who had moved to live in Palestine. Like many of the other Kinder, it took a long time for her to speak about her experiences.
“We had the Anne Frank exhibition come to Sheffield in 1984, and after that I got permission to go give talks in schools. And the number of people who said, ‘Sue, I didn’t know that about you.’”
“It’s not an easy subject to bring up.”
And in recent years, one of the group of 15 Czech Kinder who travelled with Sue made contact, and many of the group have since met up in London, Prague and Israel. She has also got back in touch with an old friend from home who now lives in Chicago, and they speak regularly.
Shared experiences
For Sue and others, it is clear that significant anniversaries and public events like Suitcase are important for bringing Kinder together and helping them begin to talk about their shared experiences. As each big anniversary of the Kindertransport arrives, there is a growing urgency in sharing their stories.
But Ros and Jane Merkin also think Suitcase has a contemporary relevance, both to the families of Kinder and to child refugees today.
Jane said: “A guy in Hull came up to us who was desperate to get a ticket, because his mother came [on the Kindertransport]. He took out an envelope and produced a photograph of this group of Kinder lined up at Hull station who had just arrived from London. And there was his mother, aged about five, in this amazing big thick fur coat.
“This guy looked at me and just started to cry. It was extraordinary.”
But Suitcase is not simply a piece of historical drama. Some of the individual scenes, such as the lady who tells the audience that Britain is full and can’t cope with any more refugee are clearly written with a nod to the modern world. Why do the writers think that the Kindertransport story is so relevant today?
“Finding out things like 1100 unaccompanied kids still arrive in Britain each year,” Ros explained.
Jane said: “Now it’s even harder for kids to make their way from a country where things are so bad they can’t stay there any longer.
“We need to be aware of what’s going on and look after them and protect them.”
I wrote a few news articles for Forge Press, the student newspaper, when I started my course at Sheffield in September 2013. Here it is on their website.
The University of Sheffield has helped launch the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities, a new £23m initiative that will fund scholarships for 300 doctoral students over the next five years.
The White Rose College will be one of the largest doctoral training schools for arts and humanities in the UK.
Alongside the universities of York and Leeds, Sheffield is a member of the White Rose Consortium, a partnership between the three Russell Group universities established in 1997.
£19m has been provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the White Rose Consortium will provide an additional £4m.
As well as studying at their own university, successful applicants will benefit from specialist research and employability training from White Rose College and the opportunities to study abroad and go on placements.
Professor Richard Jones, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield, said: “The funding from the AHRC is a real vote of confidence in the depth of scholarship and the quality of the doctoral experience in Arts and Humanities in the three universities. Potential applicants for these AHRC studentships, as well as students funded by other means, will see this award as a badge of quality, helping us continue to attract the brightest doctoral students.”
Since its formation the White Rose Consortium has raised over £130m for the three Universities involved.
Applications for the White Rose College open in November 2013, with the first group of students starting in Autumn 2014.
The new college qualifies as one of the AHRC’s Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs) and as an AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT).
Dominic Smith 