Nii Sackey

Grime artist Pase performing in Urban
Classic: Omae Woolnough

Nii Sackey is the director of Bigga Fish, a not-for-profit social enterprise which works with young people, and which he set up in 1999 when he was only 21 years old. He wanted to help change lives, and, through an outstanding entrepreneurial flair, quickly built up a programme of urban music workshops and large-scale public performance events involving young people and for young people, led by a sizeable, equally young Bigga Fish team.

Nii reduced Bigga Fish's activities to undertake a Clore Fellowship three years ago. Since then, he has been re-building ideas and plans for a new phase as his horizons for what Bigga Fish can achieve expand.

Nii has a truly distinctive vision, which involves him realising -producing -projects across many ways of working: participatory workshops, large-scale performance events, enterprise programmes, Carnival Mas camps, ambitious artistic collaborations, and through all of these a strong embrace of the internet and how to work at this new frontier. His passion is for young peoples' creativity and self-expression, and to help them establish themselves through the learning and enterprise opportunities that Bigga Fish's work creates. Still only in his late 20s, he is in the earlier phases of realising his ambitious ideas. What drives him is his sense of service and his responsibility to help create change, his commitment to respond to the energy and possibilities of young people, and his breadth of vision and passion for urban culture and its music.

I grew up around Kilburn, and then Brent. I went to a good school, and on to an all-right sixth form college, though neither seemed to fit me. My school report said 'Bright, though easily distracted': I think I was still looking for something that captured my imagination. I took a year out, worked different jobs, made some money, and paid to do a course in graphics and advertising. I met the manager of the girl band All Saints at the butchers where I was working, and talked my way into working as his gopher. On a work errand, I dropped into the Winchester Project, a youth centre in Swiss Cottage. The worker mentioned the police wanted to install surveillance to film the kids in the square; we both agreed the police would be better using the resources to do something positive for the young people instead of trying to catch them out. I decided to do something about it, and came up with the idea of doing a DJ workshop at the centre. Music's always been a passion, and I knew it was the same for those kids too.

I raised some money from the Arts Council, the community centre gave us the space for free, and Camden covered the cost of the decks. I asked a local graffiti artist to design the flyer. We started with 'Bigg Fish', but then we heard about something else with the same name. In a moment of genius, my sister suggested we call it 'Bigga'. Bigga Fish was born.

The workshop was completely oversubscribed, and went really well. The next idea was an MC workshop. The funding had run out, but we did it anyway, and that worked too. The young people involved asked me what the point of learning was if there was nowhere for them to perform. So we found a community hall, a friend lent the cash for the sound system, and I paid it back
from the door money. The event sold out. The performers and the audience were 16 or so; I was 20.

We were carrying on with the workshops and I was still at art college. One day an equipment sponsor I'd approached rang me in class. He was offering me incredible stuff, and I had to sort it out with him there and then. The teacher was furious, because I wouldn't get off the phone until I'd finished the deal. It was clear I had to make a decision. The next day I discussed it with the teacher and later I spoke to the class. I said I'd really enjoyed my time but I had to announce I was leaving. Someone asked why. I said, 'It sounds corny, but I'm leaving to follow my dream'. I wanted to make a difference with the kids in my environment, to move and inspire them, and I felt that I could. I was 21 and that's how it started.

The way I saw it was to strike relationships with a school. I offered a free workshop, turned into paid workshops, turned into weekly paid workshops, turned into lots of schools -and then I had staff. For the first year and a half I was really broke. I used to joke with young people involved with Bigga Fish that I lived off chips and Thai chilli sauce for an entire year, but it was true -it was all I could afford. It's taken a long time to learn that it's not OK to pay everyone but yourself: you can't help anyone if you can't help yourself. And a lot of people don't want to pay you what you're worth.

I was running a lot of the workshops at first: I'm really particular about how I want the sessions to feel, the ethos that we communicate, and how to work with young people. Our model was simple: young people delivering services to young people. Every year our outputs and activity doubled. Within three years, we'd built up to 11 full time employees, numerous part-timers and even more volunteers, earning income through contracts to provide workshops and through our own live events. We worked with most of the boroughs north of the river and a few of those south, youth services, schools, pupil referral units, prisons, health authorities, homeless organisations, British Airways, and the BBC. We ran workshops, we gave advice, we got around.

Right from the start, alongside the workshops were our events -well-known urban artists guesting in incredible line-ups alongside workshop participants. Ticket prices ranged from free to £9. Few of them were funded: we were too busy to apply. With monthly sell-out events at Camden Palais, the Forum in Kentish Town and the Rocket in Islington, we invested in the creative experience of the event and, most importantly, the security, though we hardly made any profit as a result. We created another company, Velvet Lobster, combining both the security and youth worker perspectives, to manage all our security needs, and in turn this company advised other events and agencies on their approach.

Security aside, the events were run by a staff team with an average age of around 19, and the audiences were nearly all under 18. The events weren't so much about the guest artists: they were about Bigga Fish, young people learning and sharing together. The young people came because they were going to see other young people on stage. When they arrived and were frisked by security, there was a young person asking how they were. We took the responsibility and did our best. If parents had issues, we'd talk. They were some of our biggest advocates.

I always had this really strong idea in my head about the brand, and how we should build it. And I spot opportunities, I spot them when I walk into any room, and if you miss one, you miss the others that will result from that one. This has helped Bigga Fish build something from nothing, as has our persistence and vision. When I'm committed to making something happen, it's sometimes to the despair of those around me! It's a kind of very wide, narrow vision -like a big magnifying glass. It makes the picture bigger, and focuses the rays into one point, the point where you're trying to get to, the point of ignition. Like the Bigga Fish Carnival project. People continuously said to us it couldn't be done, so then we pushed harder, and now we've taken 700 young people safely through three Notting Hill Carnivals.

Three years ago or so, in my mid-20s, I began feeling like I'd got to the end of my own resources and knowledge. I had a massive team, and we were always trying to generate enough money to continue with our creative aspirations. I was constantly dealing with management and money issues, and wasn't being a creative person anymore. I heard about the Clore Leadership Programme, applied and got accepted.

Clore gave me space and new perspectives, time to digest and to reflect on our achievements. Often I didn't stop to survey the beauty and enormity of what we'd done, the highs and the lows. I scaled Bigga Fish right back down to our key programmes while I was doing Clore, though we were still engaging and working with crazy amounts of young people over that time, still pushing the creative boundaries.

Now I'm pretty much ready to take it all on to another stage. The ideas are not dissimilar. I'm just a bit older, learnt a bit more, and I'm focusing on the building blocks, the resources, the people we need to really succeed. It'll be a smaller team now, but I want our footprint and impact to be a lot bigger. I want to see creative expression shared, across genres, cultures and people.

I've always travelled, and every time I go away I come back transformed in some way. And I'm mixed race. My whole world is about worlds coming together, bringing different perspectives, polarities together. One of the biggest obstacles is to get young people to expand their horizons, to show them that this world in London, the way they see it, is not all there is. The possibilities are so much bigger. I'm asking them to open up to new perspectives, to see the different levels of existence going on in the world.

I spent three months in North Africa seconded to the British Council, researching and consulting on the development of Hip Hop and inner city music there. I found that, compared to the UK, there are similar issues of economic hardship, though within very different contexts, and the passion for the music is the same. What's different is the African musicians' affinity to the rich cultural context and environment that surrounds them. Here young people have battened down the hatches and reduced things to the lowest expectation. They are so often dealt with as a problem, seen as anti-social, their environment and culture restricted, policed, demonised. Violence is an everyday part of their lives, and respect is no longer a given in an environment that continues to become ever more challenging. Their music reflects all this, made by kids at home when it's easier to make something angry than something full of hope and happiness. Young people should be seen creatively as the producers, the generators, the catalysts. Too often they're just seen as the consumer. This is all wrong. It must start and end with them.

Last year, we co-produced a project called Urban Classic, putting Grime artists that we knew together with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Hackney Empire. I'd had the idea for a few years, but had never found the right partners, and in a conversation with Claire Whitaker discovered that Serious wanted to engage new audiences. Together we made it happen. It was fantastic to work with Serious: their approach to the project and its delivery taught me so much. Bigga Fish brought the concept, the relationships with the Grime artists, our relationship with BBC 1Xtra, and a particular energy the event needed; Serious had the know-how and infrastructure, the relationship with Radio 3 and other artists involved, and their own energy. It was a genuine, inspiring partnership that would never have happened without any one of us involved -Bigga Fish, Serious, all the artists, and both bits of the BBC, who'd never worked together and found in this project their opportunity.

For me, it was about bringing together two worlds, two sets of perceptions, two stereotypes, two musical genres. It was fantastic to be able to think it, and then to work with such a range of fantastic people to help the idea be realised. We sparked people's imaginations, blurred their expectations, and with real integrity and authenticity. We brought new audiences together, we linked high level institutions with musicians at the grass roots, and the artistic content worked.

We took the orchestra and their music, and said this doesn't only belong to middle class, wealthy England, let's use it, do what the street always does, take something, twist it and put it back out. The orchestra walked through a mirror for that moment, and out the other side. We all did. And through the development process, we rubbed off on each other. The Grime artists have different horizons now. On lots of levels, not just the way creatively they make music -but like the resources that people have, resources that they rarely, if ever, get the chance to use.

I'm a pessimistic optimist, but I see how polarised it is in the arts and the voluntary sectors. There are glass walls and glass ceilings, however I focus on building bridges. We need access to those resources, and there needs to be a greater level of partnership and relative distribution, because the young people I work with are so bound by their environment, and the psychology of their environment, that if we can all do more things like Urban Classic, that pull them into another space, we can make what we've done so far look piecemeal. It's about how we offer new possibilities of creative expression to young people, so we can learn about ourselves and about each other. It's about how we communicate authentically, with integrity, passion and power, to new young ears.

I know that what I'm doing ticks every single box: we have delivered creatively, built partnerships, inspired. We still have much to achieve, lessons to learn and mountains to climb. But now we have removed the traditional barriers that have challenged grass roots growth, and it is about whether funders and partners buy into our vision, the vision that young people are our possibility for a better future.

About the future, I'd say: 'All things are possible, watch this space.' The future's bright.

When you work with young people, you get this immense potential and possibility, enriching beyond enriching, like standing on the top of the hill in the sun, you get the full beam of being human and helping someone and feeling great about that. I know this is about service, about sacrifice. I haven't had a normal life in years. I can't complain; I love it, I made my bed, and at night I always sleep well and, even if I don't remember my dreams, I know that I had them...

I'm still going to workshops because I need to know what it's like in the trenches: if I order someone over the top, I need to understand why they succeed or fail, why some things work and others don't. I'm proud that I can find myself in the morning at the House of Commons presenting and then in the afternoon at a South Kilburn estate in a workshop. The view may change. The vision does not.

I'm 29 now and getting older, so I'm not with the young people in the same way any more, though, if I'm good and I've done my job properly, I should have facilitated a legacy that allows the Bigga Fish way to continue. What I'm interested in is setting young people off to fish for themselves, giving them a rod so that they see it as their responsibility to hand it on to their peers who also need it: 'Thinking Bigga, Being Bigga'.