A) Organisational development

Despite the covid-19 crisis that has been taking place since the beginning of 2020, Kayd was able to respond and adjust to the pandemic crisis by restructuring its main ways of engaging with its audience and deliver content by becoming digitally resilient and investing heavily on our digital presence and delivery. With our business developer, who assisted us with finalising our business plan as well as redrafting and creating a number of major policies, including safeguarding and employment policies. We are also in the process of applying to become a National Portfolio Organisation through Arts Council of England. We have identified and filled the gaps in our board to transform Kayd’s board into a multiskilled cohort. We have majorly restructured our board with the addition of a new board member and the departure of one the founding members due to ill health. The board is leading on assisting staff towards becoming more digitally viable and environmentally conscious. We have created and finalised plans for quarterly board meetings and our trustees now play a bigger day-to-day role in helping us manage our projects.

B) Digital Transformation

Our exciting digital transformation as a result of hiring our media and digital content lead, enabled us to deliver a number of projects both online and in person during this period. We were able to support approximately 280 creatives through ad hoc projects, SWF and online initiatives and our social media reached 30,761k total, an increase of 50% overall from last year’s total of 15k (15.3k YouTube, 3.3k Facebook, 10.7k Twitter, 1.4k on Instagram)

Confined but Creative

Confined but Creative project offered a paid opportunity to emerging artists in various mediums in the UK to submit their response and reaction to covid-19 and the lockdown. We were able to support 150 artists (from London, Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, London, and Sheffield), via online live performances, hosted by prominent Somalis within the arts world in the UK. We managed to reach international audiences and inspired the Somali community with our live zoom performances weekly as-well as our social media platforms by giving a platform to each artist every day on Instagram and Facebook.

New Women’s Writing Project – March – May 2021

Kayd collaborated with its long-term partner Oxford House in the beginning of 2021 to plan the phase of a brand-new writing festival for 2022 by developing a festival which platforms women writers and creates opportunities for local young people to explore their creativity. In doing, Kayd and Oxford House worked alongside Literature Producer Bea Colley and 3 brilliant (virtual) writers-in-residence to test new ideas through community writing workshops. Kayd was able to partner with OH in this project through one of its artists Amina Jama who is a Somali-British writer. She is an alumnus of Barbican Young Poets, co-host of BoxedIN and member of Octavia WOC Collective. She has been published in The Things I Would Tell You, a Saqi Books anthology, and Rising Stars children’s anthology and her pamphlet A Warning to the House That Holds Me, came out last year. Over the course of 3 months, we were able to provide a paid platform for aspiring Somali women writers from East London to write and receive professional guidance and support by a published Somali woman poet.

Ramadan Children’s Competition – April 2021

During Ramadan 2021 Kayd created its first Somali children’s art competition called “Ramadan Through a Child’s Eyes” which showcased creative responses by Somali children through drawings and other pieces of visual arts – aimed at children aged 4-14. This initiative allowed our youngest creatives to experience having a paid platform to showcase their work, receive praise, and celebrate their cultural heritage. In doing so, we were able to support 50 young creatives through this online initiative where children sent in pictures, videos, drawings and other pieces of creative work. This month-long project ran until the run of Eid marking the end of Ramadan during a time that children were home from school due to the Easter break, having just returned to school after months of lockdown and were able to engage with accessing the arts from home in a safe way.

Covid Vaccine Campaign – February 2021

In partnership with The Mayor’s Office and GLA, we commissioned Somali artists to share pro vaccine messages with the Somali community resulting in a series of spoken word, songs, photography, artists, frontline workers and community leaders in Somali and English disseminated on Kayd social media platforms. After releasing this, we asked the same three questions in polls that we did before the release of a series of creative work mentioned above: (Would you allow a vulnerable dependent to take the vaccine? Would you take the vaccine yourself? Do you feel like you have information about the vaccine?) over a set period of time to see how perceptions in the community change. This was an insightful project that confirmed a number of critical issues around the vaccine and the Somali community in particular, including the effectiveness of conspiracy theories and non-validated medical sources. By working closely with creatives who were pro-vaccine and had been vaccinated as well as Somali health professionals and community leaders, we were able to target and reach a wide-ranging multigenerational range of our Somali audience. This also provided a paid platform for our creatives.

Somali Week Festival 2020 and 2021

In 2020 we were able to present a fully online festival during a period of severe lockdown measure. In doing this, we created a 5-day festival across the final two weekends of October in line with the UK's Black History Month, with a combination of both live online events as well as the pre-recorded segments at Oxford House including traditional Somali dance, young poets performing, visual artists doing a talk and display of their art and children's entertainers conducting an interactive learning and play session. Our audience attendance online was very successful with over 5k people viewing our opening live on YouTube. The live online events included the opening launch panel which also had live music as well as an academic panel discussion, a specially commissioned covid-19 panel with Tower Hamlets Council, two book launches and a talk with a Somali movie Director. The festival ended with a live streamed pre-recorded in Hargeisa concert and interview with one of the most popular Somali artists to have emerged in the last few years. In 2021, we presented a hybrid festival with 90% of the events taking place in person with a socially distanced audience which was a huge progress from 2020’s online festival. We put on an 8-day festival that was as close to pre-covid days as possible and we were able to partner and be hosted by longstanding partners British Library for the opening launch which included highlighting Nadifa Mohamed; the only British shortlisted Booker Prize author. We were also able to host a pre-launch reception at the British Library and a socially distanced capacity of 200 in the audience. We also partnered with Rich Mix where we hosted 2 sold out nights of a brand-new British Somali play and had events in Oxford House, SOAS University as well as a sold-out closing concert at The People’s Palace, Queen Mary University. The biggest success was that we were able to have visiting guests from abroad; both the Horn, mainland Europe and North America, which is the stand-out feature that makes our festival special and unique. Through a combination of carefully selected online hybrid events and safely social distanced in person events we were able to put on a full festival that included panel discussions, book launched, children’s entertainment, traditional dance, a play, live music and poetry performances amongst other things. This year, we are going ahead with the ambition of putting on a full pre-pandemic style festival with 9-days across London, Bristol and Leicester with visiting guests from the Horn and beyond but we are also planning for a hybrid festival if social distancing measures are put back into place.

Nationwide Community Engagement - October 2021

We partnered with a local community organisation in Leicester by hosting a sister-event during the weekend of Somali Week Festival in a local community hub where a number of our artists and visiting guests from the Horn were able to perform and hold their talks in a city with a considerable Somali community. Having partnered with Bristol in the past, this was our opportunity to build a strong relationship with a community organisation in Leicester; a connection that we are planning to build on in 2022. However, we were able to engage with communities across the country, we were able to support local organisations in Bristol and Leicester and Liverpool through organising and supporting workshops and community festivals. In Bristol, we conducted and supported through a workshop that we are developing them. In Liverpool and Leicester, we partnered to conduct a community festival. In Bristol we delivered community workshops with the organisations and we are currently working with them develop a bigger activity as part of our broader nationwide engagement strategy as part of becoming an NPO and our wider SWF activities.

Supporting The Women’s Excel Centre Barking – October 2021

As part of Somali Week Festival 2021 we were able to partner with the Women’s Excel Centre in Barking by supporting their UK Black History Month event by providing them with one our Share Your Talent cohorts. We also marketed and promoted their event across our large online platform and planning on building on this strong relationship through having an event in Barking in partnership with this organisation for SWF 2022.