What We Do

FROM NOBODY TO SOMEBODY

WAYout offers free training and facilities in the arts to street and disadvantaged youth in Sierra Leone. We deliver programmes that initiate long term change for many of our students. This reduces crime and violence whilst creating safer communities. 

• We educate. We have awarded over 1800 certificates to those who society had given up on.   
• We have funded more than 60 inspirational projects and our work has directly involved more than 6,000 young people, with more than 500,000 others who have benefited. 
• We fight injustice. We have empowered women in remote villages who saw themselves as worthless and voiceless. 

WAYout works  with street youth and disadvantaged people, offering them the opportunity to have a voice through creative expression and to learn skills that can lead to employment or re-engagement with education or simply open the door back home. We have an open door policy and no time limit on how long members stay with us. The journey to learning varies for each individual. It can take up to 2 years for someone to realise what they are capable of learning. 

Many street youth are in GANGS, it’s the only way to survive on the streets. This means many WAYout members are also gang members but they leave their colours at the gate. Gang leader Bullet is now a filmmaker and works for WAYout. Gang leader and ex child soldier Fal G is now WAYout’s street ambassador and we ave opened a centre in his home town Kono which is at the centre of the diamond trade and therefore the war. Ex combatants are still on the edges of society in camps with 70% unemployment.  We encourage gang leaders to teach others and encourage them to take part in activities. Feature movie Ghost Killer brought together five different gangs to act and collaborate. 

We have worked, for several years, with UCL reader Kieran Mitton who has been researching gangs and making a film centering on gang leader Gaz B, now a poet and farmer. Gaz B started a project supporting other gang members to change their lives through farming.  The documentary is almost complete. Bullet has been making his own film following Godfather Ratty through his daily life as a loving husband and father through to hustling, stealing and meting out punishments. 

DRUGS are a massive issue in Sierra Leone at the moment especially one called Kush. The government declared a state of National security because of the scale of the problem. At WAYout we have been in conversation with the Drugs Law Enforcement Agency, who have opened a massive rehabilitation centre for kush addicts in an ex barracks. They get shut up for about 6 weeks and then let out back on to the streets and the same old problems. We are offering sessions in music, poetry and filmmaking to give addicts something more positive and healing to focus on. In Taiama we have started working with addicts who spend the day on the street and the nights in the local hospital, which can barely cope. Many WAYout members are victims of the drug. Those same members make music and films to reach other addicts. We do our best to redirect their lives but poverty and lack of jobs make it very difficult. 

Approximately 20% of the 18-35 year olds we work with were combatants during the ten year conflict – a volatile and excluded minority who felt society had rejected them, who were unemployed and had nowhere to live.  But now, following the opportunities offered them by WAYout, they have other goals in life and people are no longer afraid of them. We are committed to continue working with ex combatants.

We are embedded in our local community and many of the youth we work with sleep nearby. We hold regular screenings of films we make to local communities with great success. We have a presence at local events- marriages, funerals, birthdays and are often asked to film them. It is important that we are seen as members of the community with a responsibility to it.

WAYout is running women’s projects in the provinces. 

WAYout has a mobile studio which visits hard to reach places and in four other bases. Kono, Taiama, Bodurbu village and Ferry Junction

WAYout now has a small studio inside the male prison in Freetown, which has over 1,000 inmates. 

WAYout is not about statistics although we are proud to quote them-(see above). For us it is about knowing the individuals and not giving up on them. We are prepared to keep trying until we find what works for each young person.  We have had considerable success supporting youth to change their lives.