The Unknown Voices project aims to raise public awareness of the issues facing people whose voices are rarely heard: homeless people and refugees, people with mental health problems, marginalised women, and so on. The project began in 2007 as a collaboration between the Women's Radio
Group charity and creative skills teacher Paddy Gormley, in which a group of homeless women were trained to condict interviews using digital audio recorders and went on to record interviews with more than thirty male and female members of Crisis Skylight, London E1.
Work was temporarily suspend in 2008, following the tragic death of project co-founder Julie Hill, However, Paddy Gormley continues to work with other practitioners in similar fields. Accordingly, in 2011, this website was extended to include additional audio recordings that extend the work of Unknown Voices and that will, it is hoped, give rise to further phases of the project.
Scroll down this page for further details about the oroginal project, including excerpts from a behind-the-scenes audio programme featuring the voices of everyone involved in the project. Click the links below for the other audio resources.
2007 Interviews
Art vs Rehab
Art on the Airwaves
Click the image above for the recordings page from the 2007 project, featuring 32 interviews with people who have experienced homelessness. The total playing time is about two hours.
Click the image above for a page of information about Art vs Rehab, a seminar to explore and provoke relationships between art and mental health. The page includes audio extracts and a summary report.
Click the image above for Face Value: Art
on the Airwaves, an audio exhibition by Fabiola
Franco-Palmier, in which she explores the hidden
talents of members of Crisis Skylight who have experienced homelessness (23'13").
Unknown
Voices 2007
On-Line
Audio Recordings
The Recordings page features 32
click-to-play audio recordings
in which men and women
speak candidly and movingly about
their experiences of homelessness.
Click on the image below
for the recordings page.
Radio Programme
A radio programme about the Unknown Voices
project is now available for broadcast. The programme includes:
interviews with members of the Unknown Voices team and with
some of the women trained by them,
recordings made during the course for training purposes,
"behind the scenes" interviews with Richard Stevens
(Fast Forward Grants), Leslie Morphy (Chief Executive, Crisis
UK) and Richard Pace (Head of Crisis Skylight, London E1),
illustrative extracts from the Unknown Voices interviews.
The original Unknown Voices project was led by Women's Radio
Group, in collaboration with Exciting
Writing teacher Paddy Gormley. The work was funded
by GLE Fast Forward and hosted
by Crisis
Skylight, London E1.
Click on the images
on the right
for the project partners' respective websites.
Phase
1 Objectives
The pilot
phase of the project, completed in February 2008, had two objectives:
to involve homeless and otherwise disadvantaged women in a training
programme in which they could learn how to record and edit their
own and other people's stories;
to make digital audio recordings of the stories of other, similarly
disadvantaged people, men and women, for presentation in this website.
Some of the women who completed the initial training course in
2007 continued their training with further support
from Women's Radio Group (WRG).
WRG's courses lead to units accredited by the Open
College Network.
Phase 2 — How You Can Help
In future years, we hope to:
offer the training programme to further homeless and otherwise
marginalised women;
help other agencies to launch their own Unknown
Voices initiatives
using the template that we have devised;
build the library of recordings presented on this website,
perhaps extending it to other socially marginalised groups: refugees,
ex-offenders, etc;
enable agencies and community workers to use Unknown
Voices interviews to cathartic effect.
Please contact
Paddy Gormley to discuss
opportunities for further development of the project
or simply to comment on this website
or the issues it raises.
The Unknown Voices project
was temporarily suspended in 2008 out of respect for the late
Julie Hill, without whom the project would not have happened: Julie
died of cancer in July 2008.
Unknown Voices project co-founder
Paddy Gormley (pictured right, with Julie in November 2007) writes:
"We hope to continue the work of Unknown
Voices as a lasting tribute to Julie. In addition
to our ongoing work with homeless people, we wish to extend the
project to address other areas of marginalisation, including
refugees, ex-offenders, people with disabilities and the long-term
unemployed. All offers of support, financial and/or in-kind,
will be gratefully received."
