A FFirm FFavourite in FForest Hill

We are Helen and Maya, the founders of Featured in Fifteen. As we’re local Londoners, we wanted to create a community arts movement that celebrated the FFabulous rich mix of creative talent that we have in Forest Hill. The FF concept was born around a table (in late May 2017), just before school pick-up. We sat and thrashed out ideas around “What would be our perfect night out?” The answer was an evening of interesting talks by various local curators, a drink with friends and somewhere not too far from home.

Since we both had a genuine respect for TED talks, the idea of providing an audience with more than one speaker (with a drink in hand) in a limited timeframe (15 minutes) felt like an interesting challenge for us — so that’s when Featured in Fifteen came to life.

So how does FF Function? We spend a lot of our time hunting down amazing people — which isn’t easy because a lot of these incredible people are not always on social media. We read, we watch and we spend time in and around our area, listening and engaging and opening ourselves up to unexpected conversations, which lead to nice surprises. We work FFuriously hard to select FFive features for each event, all from different creative disciplines, as we feel this adds to the intrigue and interest of the night. We then create a theme that binds the evening together. And that’s the FF Formula!

We make every event personal, with each of our themes coming from our own experiences and feelings, and this is what makes every FF evening unique. The people we’ve had the privilege to meet and to become connected to have enriched our lives and given us a new perspective on so many aspects of life and the wider world. Organising FF has been an incredible amount of FFun, laughter and FFriendship.

Looking back over our first year, we had no idea FF would become what it is today — a calendar event that our community looks forward to. To date we have curated eight events and featured 35 FFantastic, inspirational local individuals, and we’ve created a wonderful network of creativity that everyone involved feels connected to through FF.

If you haven’t been to a Featured night yet then please do make it to our next event on October 18th at The Signal pub in Forest Hill. Tickets are £10 and available via our website www.featured15.co.uk; please bring a FFriend and spread the word about our project whenever you can.