fbpx Launching our lockdown poetry challenge - London Youth
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27 April 2020

Since the lockdown began over a month ago, we have been hearing from youth organisations, youth professionals and young people about how they are coping and adapting. Youth organisations have started delivering online sessions, sharing resources and setting fun challenges for young people. Many young people are using their interest in creative activities like writing, drawing, or music-making, to stay positive and help process this extraordinary experience. 

In response to the current situation, we’re launching our first online Poetry Challenge.

We are inviting our member youth organisations to take part by running flexible, fun and accessible poetry sessions or setting quick poetry challenges, and submitting the poems their young people produce.  

Never done anything to do with poetry before? Not to worry! We have created a resource pack full of ideas for how to get started, including top tips, a template session plan and lots of quick creative energisers and challenges, all suitable for beginners. 

To enter the challenge, please fill in this short form to sign up. As soon as we receive your form, we’ll be in touch with more information and we’ll send over the resource pack to help you get started. 

How it works 

  • The challenge will run throughout May 2020 
  • Youth organisations can choose how they want to get young people involved. You could simply share the challenge with your young people and let them have a go in their own time. Or, use our resource pack to run some creative workshops for young people online. We are here to support you to plan and run these sessions if needed.  
  • Once your young people have poems they are proud of, it’s time to submit! You can submit as many poems as you like, but up to a maximum of 350 words per poem. Submit your poems by emailing them to our Arts Development Manager Emily in whatever format you prefer.  
  • We will share some of our favourites online in early June and we’ll create an online magazine of all the poems submitted. If you wish, you can also share the poems on social media using the hashtag #LYPoetryChallenge 
  • The deadline to submit your poems is Friday 29th May at 5pm. After this, you’re more than welcome to continue using the resource pack and sharing poems on social media, but they will not be included in our online magazine. 

We hope this challenge will give young people a fun way to express themselves and share how they are feeling. We are also hoping that it will help youth organisations offer something different, and make poetry part of what they do with young people in the long term. We can’t wait to see the submissions! 


Click here to view more arts opportunities.

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