Liam, known online as Skirmz: our inaugural Community Award
Liam, known online as Skirmz, received our inaugural Community Award; his content has since drawn six million views.
Most of what Empowered Voices recognises arrives in a Word document: an essay, a proposal, an innovation. The Community Award is different. It recognises creativity and determination shown in the open, and its first recipient is Liam, a young performer known online as Skirmz, or Skirmish.
Since the award, Liam’s content has gone on to attract six million views across all platforms. That number is a milestone for his own work, counted separately from anything Empowered Voices has published, and it belongs to him. We did not make it happen; we noticed what he was doing and said so.
Our Impact Report describes him as “a young performer developing his voice and sharing it with an audience far beyond his immediate community”. A voice deserves a hearing before it is polished, and determination is easiest to see in someone who keeps posting, keeps performing and keeps improving before anyone has told them to.
We did not make it happen; we noticed what he was doing and said so.
The award sits alongside the essays and inventions because the charity’s promise is the same in every case: young people have extraordinary things within them, and their ambitions deserve to be heard and backed. Sometimes it means a MacBook. Sometimes it means saying publicly that a voice is worth hearing, so that the next performer in the same position knows that someone is listening.