Two years ago, Monique Habbib, a then Queen’s Park staffer, decided she wanted to encourage young people to demonstrate their civic rights. Working with a team of like-minded friends, she started looking for 'cool' ways to encourage youth to vote in the upcoming provincial elections.
Habbib decided to use the performing arts to leverage youth engagement. The result was a concert--by young people for young people--performed for over 500 high school students at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts.
The performance was such a success that Habbib decided to commit herself full-time to the project. She left her Queen's Park job, and created
Next Edition (NXE). The organization's mandate is to use performing arts in a socially conscious way to get young people civically engaged.
"I founded Next Edition as a social enterprise, as a company. That was a year ago," says Habbib. "And we just started to come up with new ideas about how we should be engaging young people in civic engagement in an interesting way."
Now, two years later, the whole enterprise has come full circle. Habbib’s newest project, and the most ambitious to date, is a comic web-series called Queen’s Park. The series takes inspiration from Habib’s years working for the provincial governments.
"The concept for Queen’s Park, which came from some jokes I had with a colleague while I worked there, is political comedy about a 25-year old rapper from the 'hood; who joins a dysfunctional team of political staffers. It’s funny but also has an important message and looks at real political and community issues.
"At Next Edition we engage young people in civic engagement and we do it through media and art," says Habbib, "But everything that we do is socially conscious. We always want to have a message and the end of it."
Habbib and the NXE team spent last summer shooting the first five of 13 episodes of the web series and they did it all with almost no-funding or filmmaking experience.
"We did everything using in-kind services. The whole project was totally grassroots. The young people that work with us we call ourselves team NXE. They range from artists, to web designers, to event planners. And they’re all young people under 30. Everyone who is on our team is following their dreams and putting themselves out there. That’s what I admire about them. They want this to be their career."
The first episode of Queen’s Park was shown last Thursday night to audience of over 100 people at a special screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
"TIFF has been great to us. Their mandate is to help young filmmakers," says Habbib."We didn’t really consider ourselves filmmakers. We just had a message and a story we wanted to get out to people. But we somehow got this partnership with TIFF. They've provided us with support through mentoring and looking over our scripts."
Episode one of Queen's Park will be uploaded on the NXE site early this month.
View the Queen’s Park trailer below.
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Monique Habbib, Director, NXE