Olivia Downtown, our Engagement Assistant, shares her journey of working with young people whilst helping to preserve Children’s Capital of Culture's story for future generations in Rotherham.
I’m Olivia, an Engagement Assistant for Children’s Capital of Culture. I started my journey with Children’s Capital of Culture in 2024, as an Archives Trainee at Rotherham Archives and Local Studies. I still work with the Archives team as part of my current role, so I have an interesting mix of responsibilities!
As an Engagement Assistant, I work directly with young people and Rotherham communities. I’m involved in things like helping deliver community festivals as well as creative workshops that help young people achieve their Arts Award (an accredited qualification!). But I’ve also been actively collecting materials from across many of these projects to be preserved at Rotherham Archives for centuries to come.
I was surprised to learn how much crossover there is between my two seemingly very different roles. A highlight of my time as an Engagement Assistant which has involved both the ‘engagement’ and ‘archiving’ parts of my role has been working with the Heritage Producers: a group of young people collecting oral history interviews which will inform a community event that each of them will run across Rotherham’s 25 wards. My experience with archives came in very handy for this project, as I have been able to assist with the more technical processes involved in oral history projects (lots of paperwork!). But I’ve also been able to support the Heritage Producers with developing their ideas and planning for their events from an engagement perspective, too.
In my role at Rotherham Archives and Local Studies, I learned why archives are so important – they are essentially evidence of human activity. They provide an unbiased, primary source of information which is important for a whole host of reasons. Archives are not only for academics; they are open to everyone. Many different people and organisations access our material for different reasons. For example, some use archives to research their family history, or to inform their creative pursuits such as writing or filmmaking. But there are also endless legal and ethical reasons why it’s vital that archives are preserved and made accessible to the public.
So far, I’ve seen a range of donations come into the collection from across Children’s Capital of Culture and its various projects. This includes artwork, photographs, posters, flyers and more from various community events that we’ve been involved in, but also some of the ‘boring’ stuff like planning documents. You may not think that the everyday documents you create will be worth anything but these are some of the most enlightening records we have, as they are a bit like a behind-the-scenes view of a project. If you could imagine someone 100 years from now trying to learn more about Children’s Capital of Culture, it is these ‘boring’ documents that will really tell them the what, when, where and why behind how it all came together.
So, how could these archival records be utilised in the future? Children’s Capital of Culture has already had a massive impact on our borough and will continue to have a ripple effect on the lives and careers of the young people who live here for years to come. Academic researchers may stumble upon the Children’s Capital of Culture archive collection while looking into the history of Rotherham, while creatives may seek inspiration from the projects we have planned and delivered. Rotherham is the very first Children’s Capital of Culture, so I like to hope that other towns or cities might look to us for how they can enrich the lives of their young people as well.
Our archive material often features in exhibitions at Clifton Park Museum, where Rotherham Archives is based, so this is another way in which the Children’s Capital of Culture Archive Collection could be used in the future – which I personally think is very exciting to consider!
I will be sad to see the Children’s Capital of Culture festival delivery come to a close in March 2026, but it’s exciting to think that I have been a part of preserving its legacy. I hope to see lots more records coming into the archive before the end of March!
