Photo: Kate Green

So the Trailblazers’ map has been published and today it will be presented by 2030’s Executive Mayor of Birmingham to the current incumbent The Right Worshipful, The Lord Mayor, Councillor Raymond Hassall.

Today is the conclusion of Trailblazers: In A Visible City, a project that we stated in October. It is finally the day when that idea we pitched, casually saying “and then the whole thing concludes with the participants taking over the council house for the day” finally has to happen. We have twelve artists lined up to take 120 14 & 15 year olds through four workshop activities in the morning. They create placards carrying political messages, they devise new city budgets, they create coats of arms for the city, they write speeches setting out their visions for the city’s future. Everyone has lunch, then we all move into the council chamber. The adults sit up in the public gallery, the young people sit in the councillor’s seats. Three coats of arms are presented and voted on. Three budgets are proposed and voted on. Three speeches are delivered and voted on. The student who wins the speech vote gets the honour of presenting the Lord Mayor with the first copy of the Trailblazers’ Map.

The map can be viewed as a Prezi shotly and the project’s photographs can be seen right now on bhamtrailblazers on flickr. The videos linked to from the Prezi can be seen on our new YouTube channel – in fact they are currently the only content of our new YouTube channel Stan’s Cafe Theatre.