Sonny Blijden is a jack of all trades who works in Noord. He previously worked for an employment agency as a business consultant, but during the COVID-19 pandemic he decided to take a new path. He is now is a youth worker and maker. Despite growing up thinking he had two left hands, he discovered that he can learn and create in the past two years. His maker career started when he built a bar from an example he found online. When his neighbour moved away and offered him some leftover wood, he was inspired to start a new project. He hasn’t stopped making since. Sonny tries to pass on this message to the young people he works with: you can achieve what you want to, but it starts by taking a small first step. He sees many youngsters in Amsterdam growing up in marginalised areas and going down the wrong path. They grow up with a very limited idea of their potential, similar to when he was younger. Their environment seems to determine their options, while their potential is much bigger than that. He encourages them, telling them “It’s about willpower and not giving up when it gets hard. Think of solutions: how do I make it better?”.
what the archive is about
The Living Archive explores the potential of (post)industrial heritage to transform production in our cities. We collect stories with participatory heritage methods. The nodes for the local collection efforts are Fab City Hubs (FCH). The collection has been carefully assembled by FCH teams who have been learning about, co-creating and applying participatory heritage-making approaches, emotion networking methodology, oral history principles and creative perspective-taking. Select tags and categories to filter stories in the archive below. Explore their connections in the network graph.
