This man helped me put down the gun and pick up the camera

 
20 April 2012

The scar running down Hassan Craftz Kamara's face from his left eye to his mouth marks the night the 22-year-old nearly died after being slashed with a mini Samurai sword at a party.

"I was holding my face together, trying to stop things falling out before the medics patched me with 22 stitches," he said.

But Mr Kamara, then 17, was no innocent bystander. "I f**ked up between 16 and 18, crashed into a brick wall. My dad died when I was nine and I looked up to the wrong people.

"I got into a Shepherd's Bush gang called MDP, short for Money Drugs Power or Murder Dem Pussies. I packed a 38 [handgun] and, of course, a knife."

The gang terrorised west London between 2007 and 2009. Some members were killed, others were jailed for murder. Mr Kamara was sentenced to two years at young offender institutes for assault and violent disorder.

Today he is a man transformed, a film-maker with a place on a media studies course at Ravensbourne College, Greenwich. "I've put down the gun, picked up the camera," he said. "Instead of shooting people, I'm shooting films." He motioned to his "mentor" Dean Stalham, 48, sitting alongside him in the cafeteria at Goldsmiths College. "Dean's my inspiration. He taught me that if you choose to reform your ways and try hard, you will get somewhere in life."

Mr Stalham, 48, himself a former convict, started the charity Art Saves Lives in 2009 to help vulnerable young people find their voices as writers, artists and film-makers. He did it because art saved his life.

While serving three and a half years in Wandsworth jail in 2004 he wrote a play - sponsored by the Royal Court Theatre - that would be performed in front of 200 inmates to a standing ovation, prompting him to mend his ways and become an award-winning playwright. His example inspired three fellow inmates to follow in his footsteps, but he saw how hard it was for people with previous convictions to break through, so he started the charity to help them.

The Evening Standard's Dispossessed Fund has made a £9,000 grant to support Art Saves Lives. The cash will fund two five-month film-making courses at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The course is aimed at young offenders and will pay for professionals to take 56 students through the process of script writing, story boarding, filming and editing, culminating in the production of a movie.

"It is the first substantial grant received by Arts Saves Lives and follows a course run last year by Inside Films, which saw ex-offenders - including Mr Kamara and his friend Prince Shaka Owusu, 21 - make a raw but compelling 12-minute film. Titled Bare Inequality, it asks: "Why is my area so poor and yours so rich? What can be done about it?"

Their Dispossessed Fund grant is one of 163 amounting to £1.25million announced yesterday to support groups tackling poverty across the capital. The fund has raised £7.3million since it was launched in July 2010, of which £3million has been given so far to charitable projects, transforming the lives of tens of thousands of Londoners.

Mr Stalham leads his charity by example. "I led a gangster's life," he said. "I had a £500,000 house in Stanmore, a villa in Spain, two antique shops, and I was in a relationship with a Page 3 girl. I thought I had it all, but actually I was a fraudster living on borrowed time, and when the police caught up with me in 2004 I lost everything."

Born in Edgware to a dinner lady and her bingo manager husband, he grew up in a large extended family full of "colourful" uncles and cousins. He bunked off school regularly to play pool in Carnaby Street, he said. "So when I was about to take O-levels, my dad said, 'Don't bother, I've got you a job with Uncle Eddie'." However, Uncle Eddie, he said, turned out to be "less of a builder, more of a heroin dealer".

Mr Stalham's police charge sheet runs to several pages. In 1980, age 17, he was found guilty of stealing a car and fined £100. In 1984 he was arrested for assault; in 1986 for carrying a knife in a public place. Then in 1994, aged 31, he was jailed for two years for conspiring to defraud banks, after police smashed his fake credit card ring which stretched from Rotterdam to Lagos.

A spell in Pentonville and Ford Open Prison failed to mend his ways. "Ford was full of bent solicitors and I learned even more about how to do fraud," he said. In 2004, having opened two antiques shops in Watford, he was sentenced to three and a half years for handling stolen art. "I had four original silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol - Mao, Lenin, Superman and Marilyn - worth £55,000 each, 13 Chagall etchings and 33 Dali lithographs which were hard to value because you couldn't sell them."

It was in Wandsworth Prison that Mr Stalham decided to "take education". "One day, well-known writer Jane Bodie came from the Royal Court Theatre to run an eight-week script writing course and the prize was that the best plays would be performed. I was one of eight on the course and wrote If The Cap Fits, about tensions in an East End road that's gentrified when a cap factory is turned into loft apartments."

Not only was his play performed, it won a Koestler Trust Award for art by offenders. "That was the moment that changed my life. To watch your own words performed in front of 200 inmates was the crowning moment.

"I couldn't stop writing after that. I became editor of Wano, the prison magazine, and wrote four full-length plays before my release in 2006. I used to wake up my cell-mates to act out the scenes. Three of them were inspired to start writing plays."

When he got out, he was asked to speak at an Open Book forum encouraging ex-offenders into tertiary education, and there he met author Will Self, who gave him some tips and would become "a support and a mentor".

But it was only after Mr Stalham was commissioned to design the arts installation for the Eden Project's garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, and saw the enormous positive impact the work by prisoners had on the public, that he was emboldened to start Art Saves Lives.

He runs the charity without receiving personal recompense, and says it offers young people with low self-esteem a future.

"I felt strongly that art should be accessible to all, a stepping stone to a better life," he said.
"It's thanks to the amazing Dispossessed Fund that we are able to make this happen. I am beyond thrilled. We have seen that once we get youngsters like Hassan into a university environment and they access their creativity and see a world of possibilities, it changes their outlook.

"They see there is another way. And once they've made a film they're proud of, oh boy, there's no going back. It's like a medal of honour."

"Correction: Inside Film, which we refer to in our report, has asked us to make clear that it has been running courses for prisoners and ex-prisoners since 2006. The 9-month course it ran in 2011 (to which Dean Stalham contributed two workshops) was not a pilot, as this piece originally stated."

Unlocking a brighter future

What does our fund's beneficiary do?

The charity Art Saves Lives helps marginalised Londoners, including former young offenders, to find and share their voices as artists, writers, film-makers and musicians.

Amount awarded: £9,000

Where: Lewisham

Key area: training and educating people who have dropped out of mainstream education.
How will the cash be used? To run two five-month courses in film-making at Goldsmiths, University of London, in New Cross.

The courses will target young people involved in youth offending and each course has a capacity of 28 people. Dispossessed Fund money will be used to pay for instructors and film equipment. Applications are open for the first course, starting on February 4.

Other groups we are helping

Stockwell Park Community Trust (£32,274)

Provides a haven for older local community members to speak to young gang members in an effort to turn them towards positive activities. Our grant will cover winter running costs for the community centre, open 10am to 10pm and situated in the middle of gang boundaries.

Barbara Melunsky Refugee Youth Agency (£27,188)

Inspired by the late activist Barbara Melunsky, this Lambeth-based group provides refugees who are apart from their families with a place to meet those in similar circumstances. Our grant will pay for creative activities over the winter and a countryside break for
28 young people.

The Golden Company (£15,000)

This award-winning social enterprise in Hackney works with young "Bee Guardians" to produce honey and natural cosmetics. Our grant will train 20 young people, who are at risk of social exclusion, in beekeeping, business development and life skills, with the aim of setting them on their way to becoming social entrepreneurs.

Chatterbox (£5,025)

An east London group started in 1996 to help children with speech and language difficulties, and associated emotional and social problems. Our grant will help to set up a youth club for older members, most of whom are at special needs schools, providing a safe place to socialise. The aim is to integrate them into the community by organising joint activities with local Scout groups.

BIGKID Foundation (£4,550)

Originally a rap group started by friends, the founders used freestyle "rap battling" as a platform to engage young people at risk in Lambeth and Hackney and draw them away from gangs. They work with the Fulham Football Club Foundation and have worked with several youth charities. Our grant will fund youth leadership programmes in south London.

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