Our Winter 2024 Programme is underway!

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey, which can only mean one thing… Our Winter 2024 Programme is underway! In partnership with the YMCA, as well as the Goldsmiths’ Centre, Pivot is supporting eight new Makers through our unique 12-week training programme. Throughout the programme, our Makers learn how to design, make, and market jewellery, all culminating in a pop-up show where they will sell the collection they have created.

We’re just over half way through the programme now, and wanted to give you an update on what our Makers have been up to.

The journey begins…

Our Makers’ journey with Pivot began with a taster workshop, giving them the chance to have a go at making some jewellery using donated waste acetate (a type of plastic often used for making frames for glasses). With the workshop being located in the communal canteen area of a YMCA hostel, interest gathered quickly until we had more residents wanting to join than we had chairs!

We invited everyone who attended the taster workshop and wanted to join the Pivot programme, to interview with us the following week. With only eight places available, and more than double that number showing up for interviews, the hard work of selecting who would be chosen began. The interview process is however, the moment the programme really kicks off for our Makers. Most of the applicants have limited-to-no experience interviewing for a job, and here they get the opportunity to practise this valuable skill in an environment that’s much more welcoming and forgiving than a regular job interview. Both successful and unsuccessful candidates also get detailed feedback and guidance afterwards.

With interviews completed and our Makers chosen, the programme began in earnest.

Making a Maker

Before they don their safety goggles and pick up their pliers, our Makers undergo a group coaching session led by our wonderful Head Coach, Vida Carmel. This helps our Makers to start getting into the right mindset to thrive on the programme. From Vida, our Makers learn a set of tools to better equip them to tackle the barriers they may be facing in their lives, be they emotional or external.

"Through yesterday's session I could realise the final destination of my life... I understood that whenever any obstacles stop my goal, I should find another way to overcome the problem to achieve the final goal."

Doing this in a group setting also serves to help our Makers start bonding with each other and forming a community from the very start of the programme.

The main focus of the Pivot programme is of course the jewellery making, and our Makers spend most of their time further developing the skills they first started learning during the taster workshop. As our Makers’ become more comfortable making pieces of jewellery, we also start to introduce coaching around facilitation, to prepare our Makers for a teaching workshop at the Goldsmiths’ Centre where they will become the instructors.

Another core part of the programme is the jewellery collection our Makers design and produce throughout. The theme of this year’s collection is ‘Home’, and what this means to our Makers, who are currently living in temporary accommodation. ‘Home’ may be where they have come from, or it may be where they want to be in the future.

"Last week I went home to my lovely family in my thoughts through the design activity. Thank you for that."

The first step in the design process is a form finding exercise, where participants cut out clippings from magazines to create collages which represent what home means to them. From there, they find forms (shapes) which can be turned into pieces of jewellery, which they work on throughout the remainder of the programme.

The student becomes the master

The first major milestone for our Makers is a teaching workshop at the Goldsmiths’ Centre. Here our Makers become the teachers, delivering a jewellery making crash course to the workshop attendees. This is not only a chance to show off the jewellery making skills they have been developing, but an opportunity for them to increase their self-confidence in areas including public speaking and facilitation.

We were so proud of how well all of our Makers handled the workshop, and how eagerly they threw themselves into the role of instructors. They needed no prompting at all to get stuck in right away, guiding the attendees through the making process with confidence, care, and humour! Getting to see the transformation in our Makers self-belief, especially in such a short space of time, is truly the biggest joy of the Pivot programme.

"Very good workshop, the team was great in guiding me through the process. Would 100% come again!"

Not content with simply showing the attendees how to make jewellery, some of our Makers also found time to make some really cool and unique pieces themselves, including some designs we hadn’t seen before! All of our Makers are provided with a tool set so they can practice making jewellery in their rooms at the hostel, and it was clear from seeing the pieces they created that they have been investing a lot of their time doing exactly that.

Silver ring workshop

In our most recent session, our Makers once again travelled to the Goldsmiths’ Centre to learn how to make silver rings. Working with silver represents a considerable step-up in difficulty, further expanding our Makers’ skill sets and the kinds of pieces they will be able to design and produce. Led by the master silversmith, Vicky Tawamana, and ably assisted by Georgie Browning, our Makers learned about the science behind crafting pieces of silver jewellery before taking a crack at it for themselves.

Given that none of our Makers had even picked up a pair of pliers before joining the Pivot programme, it was very gratifying to see them confidently wielding a large blowtorch by the end of the workshop! There may have been one minor jewellery casualty (one of our Makers discovered that silver will melt very quickly if you are overly eager with the blowtorch), but it was such a fun day and our Makers were beaming with pride when they showed off the rings they had made.

All caught up

So that’s it! You’re all caught up with the Pivot Winter 2024 Programme so far, but stay tuned for more updates coming very soon.