Midnimo Projects

The Café and kitchen area is one of the main projects being established at Midnimo Centre.

We are working on a Health Club which consists of cooking classes for the community, with focus on new and traditional Somali, Afro Caribbean, Spanish and English recipes as well as purely vegetarian and organic home cooking.

As well as encouraging healthy eating with organic fair trade food and drinks, we are highlighting what are the main dishes in our community and what and how we should be eating to celebrating our rich diversity of cultures in Bristol.

Kitchen’s objectives:

• To teach different cultures cooking forms that will be a big part of their cultural heritage.
• Opportunity to engage young and old to explore their own culture and that of others.
• To promote healthy eating.
• To gain experience in cooking, cash handling and stock taking.
• To take part in the management of the café.
• To gain reference.
• Produce a cookbook which reflects the community.
• Provide effective youth provision in the area.
• Encourage Somali girls and boys to interact and communicate more.
• A safer learning environment
• To create a more friendly atmosphere
• To provide more activities for young people that don’t have much to do

The project’s aims are to develop the community café as a youth and community run business, to increase and make sustainable the cooking workshops by bringing in people and funding, to offer more training and support to young men and women from the refugee and wider community especially in business start up and management skills, food hygiene and preparation and basic youth and community work skills and networking.

SampleGo "The Music Factory" is a music project that aims to explore the concept of integration through music.

Aims:

The project’s aims are to fulfil a two-way process: One, to develop a coherent artistic work (a well produced CD of original music) and another, broadening the views and opportunities of its participants and the young community of musicians, producers, rappers and other music and sound makers in the area.

How will that be achieved?

To achieve these aims, the team will work during six months to produce a CD. During this process, the producers / group advisors will guide the community group through a process of musical exchange; an experiment of crossover and mutual influence.

During the time of the project the community group will be building a database of sounds (normally short clips and loops stored in a computer) that can be used to make new music by putting them together as pieces of a puzzle or Lego. This database will also be available to view and add to by a broader community (people in the area) and hopefully later in the web.

There is therefore a mix and fusion at many different levels: Different styles are merged into one piece or one environment:

"Traditional" musicians playing musical instruments are working along with music programmers/producers, mc’s or rappers and also including other sound or influences like speech/poetry, sound artists, sound effects…

People from different social and cultural backgrounds each bringing different approaches and music traditions (such as Jamaican reggae artists, UK rappers and producers from backgrounds such as hip-hop, garage or drum&bass, African musicians playing ancient traditional music and eclectic European sound artists and musicians all coming together.

Workshops

A series of workshops are being held regularly where group members are introduced to the basics of some of these fields (electronic and organic music, loops, crossover) so they can have an insight and basic understanding of it; (those who wish to develop any of those skills further will be directed to other organisations and people that may help them to do so). The aim of these workshops is to get participants to interact with others and foster their inspiration.

They will then be encouraged to experiment and make music in a different way to the one they are used to; to hopefully achieve an enriching experience in many aspects and a fresh music product that portrait’s such collaborative and socially inclusive process.