This season we’ve worked with London design work-shop Greater Goods once again—taking fabric and hardware from damaged Gramicci gear and giving it a second life by creating a collection of one-off, truly unique garments built to stand the test of time.
The proceeds from the collection go to Urban Uprising—a charity who do great work with young people through climbing—giving disadvantaged 8-18 year olds the chance to climb, and learn invaluable life skills in the process.
Keen to find out a bit more, we caught up with James from the charity to talk about Urban Uprising’s work and why it's so important…
First off, can you tell me a bit about Urban Uprising? What does it do?
The short explanation is that we give disadvantaged young people the opportunity to transform their futures. We use our climbing program to give 8 to 18 year olds who've got a number of challenges in their life—whether they’re struggling in schools or they've got mental health issues—and we give them a chance to develop physically and socially. We take them on the 10-12 week climbing programs and we try and help them to overcome barriers that they've got by improving their resilience and mental health.
Why climbing? Why do you think that works so well for something like this?
I think, number one, it's usually something that the young people have never had an opportunity to do. So you're starting at a real level playing field for everyone that's there. And climbing is something that gives you an opportunity to improve, because you can start off on a climb and you get to a place and then you come off the wall and then you go back and you do that again next time. Along with the long term gains, there's a real short term gain in being able to just sort of see an improvement week on week.
Yeah there’s a good learning curve. Some things are almost too tough at first, so they’re kind of frustrating—but climbing is something you can pick up fast and improve quickly at, isn’t it?
You can see some improvement there and as I say, I think people start from a much more level playing field. If you take people to go and play football, some people have played football before, some people are, you know, physically stronger, more able, whatever it may be, but climbing's got a much more level playing field on what people can do from a starting position.
I imagine there's more to this than just ‘going climbing’—can you explain how the course works?
Yeah—it's not just, “Right, here's a rope, here's a helmet, here's a carabiner, just start going up”, there’s a lot more stuff around it. Each session is specifically planned out, we'll have qualified instructors at the climbing wall that work with the young people, and we've also got a host of volunteers who support that as well—whether that’s from a climbing perspective, or offering support or encouragement or welfare.
It’s not just indoor climbing either—you take the kids to real climbing spots too—I imagine that’s a bit of a buzz for these kids.
Yeah—the typical 10-week programme would be indoors, and we then do an outdoor climb for most of those groups. And that’s amazing for them—for some of these young people have never been anywhere like that.
And that’s something we’re growing—we’ve done residentials as well, where they go for a couple of days where they're staying overnight. So that’s a new area we're looking at expanding into.
How do you see Urban Uprising evolving?
We currently operate in five cities nationally, but ideally we can drive fundraising and everything else so we can look at expansion. As a charity, we’re reliant on the support we get from people like Gramicci—so it’s about driving more and more of those longer term supporters that will enable us to expand those programmes.
Were the outdoors a big thing for you as a kid? How did being outside help you when you were growing up?
I guess I come into this from a slightly different path—I’m not a climber, but I came from a relatively modest background in quite an underprivileged area and I was very fortunate that I did scouting, I did Duke of Edinburgh awards and I played rugby, and they gave me a number of skills that then helped me in my career later on. I’m so passionate about this charity because I had that opportunity growing up and I saw the benefits that myself and other individuals from our area got from doing that sort of thing.
I imagine even with the first few climbs people start to get into it and you can notice their confidence growing. What kind of effects do these climbing sessions have for the kids?
We regularly see a huge increase in confidence in wanting to try things, a massive increase in resilience about learning to deal with failure and, you know, more people participating in physical activity. We see a huge amount of improvement with people's mental health. In one of our videos there’s a girl who's just come off of the climbing wall talking about how this gets her out of the house and how much it has improved her mental health because she’s interacting with other people. So we see that really from week one, but it really builds as you go through those programmes.
And I suppose climbing is kind of the tool for that, but it's not like ‘the reason’. Whether or not they become the next generation of rock climbing pioneers is kind of besides the point.
Yeah, the climbing is there to facilitate the development of them as individuals. We're not trying to make the next group of top climbers, although we do get some kids that I want to come back on our Repeat programmes and we're looking now at how we structure stuff going forwards to engage and continue to re-engage with those people that want to continue to climb.
But actually the real aims of this are about improving the lives of those individuals and giving them opportunities that they wouldn't otherwise have. These are things that people can add to their CVs and talk about when they’re going for jobs—it’s something different to talk about and be proud of. And that's an important byproduct of what we do as well, I think.
And it's fun as well—everyone likes climbing.
It's great fun and it's safe—you're on a rope, there's mats everywhere and you've got a helmet on—but it's very fun and it's very different.
Find out more about Urban Uprising here.
Learn more about Gramicci by Greater Goods Collection 02 here.
