AQ Arts at the Home of Football
There really are so many ways for businesses to engage with communities, particularly younger communities, and Wembley Stadium is an interesting one to work with on this. AQ Arts is one of the new partners working on a vision to engage young people.
AQ Arts is an organisation Slenky knew prior to 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement driving a refreshed discussion on fairness and equality of opportunity. We’d collaborated with AQ Arts since a chance meeting at a Wembley co-working space in 2018.
The breadth of their take on Arts and Culture is really engaging, but the diversity of people who’d respond to an AQ shout out for an event or other activity really intrigued me. All ages, genders and a mix of cultural backgrounds.
It involved singing and dancing, but also poetry, spoken word, open mic sessions and a load of other stuff that would have got me fizzy just a few decades ago. More than that, the support and encouragement to actually do these things, the opportunities to build and bolster the confidence of those who had a faint interest, or a talent, or a passion they hadn’t been able to previously express. AQ created supportive environments to explore those passions.
So, it was an obvious one when talking to the Stadium about its’ various uses, and the multiple passions it could potentially appeal to via partnership with AQ. Whilst football is obvious, Arts and Culture sits more quietly within the stadium’s portfolio.
AQ Arts supported Brent’s successful Borough of Culture 2020 bid and events
NW London has an extremely rich history across all the arts, and a lot of young people were already inspired to participate in the local arts scene. But what if we could add the opportunity to do so with and within the Stadium? Shots to attend, or even participate in arts and cultural activities there?
We wanted to create simple and relevant links between the Stadium and young peoples’ passion for the arts. AQ Arts, with its online and offline community was an ideal partner. The organisation had already invvested itself and was working successfully (and independently) long before the partnership opportunity.
Slenky had already built the first bridges ahead of this, and AQ had offered Shots and recruited young people on the previous Slenky platform to participate in the Euro 2020 opening ceremony at Wembley. Covid, and the necessary precautions, killed that for the re-scheduled 2021 finals, but both parties could still be brought together to collaborate. Into partnership.
And what does partnership make possible?
Well, to start with the stadium is providing AQ with a premium space within it to host their annual performance, and via AQ alone 200 young people will access free tickets to experience FA events.
And then there’s the ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ piece. 20 young people will access stadium tours, including a look at some of football’s back-office operations that might just connect with a passion. All Shots will be free and accessible via the AQ and FA hubs on Slenky.
I hope to see the relationship grow and flourish over the coming years. Given the number of concerts, music-related events, football, and other sports that use or have performance at the heart of their event, it’s a tiny step between a young person’s passion, and an opportunity to rehearse, perform or build a career at the home of football.
#achangeisgonnacome
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