‘Just being around someone that works, that has a job, is a different environment for them’
An image from the 2026 documentary film Postcodes, exploring postcode rivalry in Hartcliffe and Knowle West(Image: Maggs Smart Media)
The people behind a film that explores the lives of young people in Bristol and the so-called ‘postcode rivalries’ affecting different areas have called for people to step forward and become role models for young people in their communities.
Serena Wiebe, the presenter of the documentary film Postcodes, said even just being a person who is stable and has a job and a bit of time for young people can make a huge difference because many troubled young people don’t have anyone in their lives ‘doing positive things’.
Serena, a 20-year-old boxing coach and mentor from Easton, has become a leading voice in the campaign against knife crime, following the murder of her close friend Eddie Kinuthia, and is a prominent member of the Government’s national taskforce tackling the issue.
She presents a film called Postcodes, which sees her travelling from her home in St Pauls and Easton to South Bristol, talking to young people in both Hartcliffe and Knowle.
The film had its first screening in South Bristol on Tuesday evening and the soon-to-be-opened 224 South Bristol Youth Zone, with community leaders and youth workers from across the area coming together to watch the film and have discussion about the issues it raised.
One particularly powerful moment in the film, which was directed by Bristol filmmaker and former youth worker Neil Maggs, came when Serena spoke to promising young boxer Lillie Hill – a close friend of Max Dixon, one of the Knowle West teenagers murdered in 2024 – at Lillie’s boxing gym in Withywood.
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She asked who the role models are for young people in the community, and Lillie replied that there aren’t any, before Serena pointed out that Lillie, as an up-and-coming older teenage boxer, was a role model herself to the younger people coming to the gym.
Serena told the film’s audience: “I think anyone can be a role model, if you’re doing good things or even if you have a normal job – because a lot of the young people that I work with, their parents either don’t work or they might sell drugs or they might not be doing positive things.
“When I was a lot younger, being around people that actually worked and actually took me under their wing and were showing me how to do certain things, that definitely kind of rewired my brain.
Bristol’s Serena Wiebe, from Empire Fighting Chance, played a key part in the Youth Opportunity Summit, alongside Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the King at St James’ Palace in London(Image: Empire Fighting Chance)
“So I think anyone in the room that has a normal job or has a good job or just has a little bit of time to just sit down and take the young person under their wing, that makes all the difference.
“Just being around someone that works is a different environment for them, and then when you do that to that one young person, that will have a domino effect on everyone else,” she added.
Zak Dugdale, the partnerships lead for the new 224 Youth Zone, said one of the aims of the new £12m facility was to encourage and support people in the community to work with young people.
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“There’s plenty of great role models in this community, and I think (the new Youth Zone) can give the platform to be able to have opportunities to become the next youth worker.
“(We need) more courses around that, training and support, but also peer-to-peer supervision and supporting each other. There’s so many great people that live in our communities that are already making a difference, and I think often we don’t shout about it, and we don’t give them that platform to scream about that, and we should do.
“We should be applauding great work that’s already going on. There’s many great organisations, many great individuals, as well, that don’t work for organisations,” he added.
Look inside the new 224 South Bristol Youth Zone Monday 20 April 2026 – with Zak Dugdale(Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach Plc)
The film, which is scheduled to be screened several times again this month and into the summer at various venues across South Bristol, also features youth workers – including Zak – talking about how they got into youth work but have faced issues because they might be from one of the areas in South Bristol and work in another.
The after-screening meeting also heard from the campaigners calling for the former Eagle House Youth Club in Knowle West to be returned to the community and reopened, who said many of the issues raised by the film were long-standing ones.
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Neil Maggs said cuts to youth services made under the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition Government in the early 2010s saw a huge loss of expertise and role models within communities.
“I was around in the era when youth services were cut 15 years ago – youth centres were closed across the city,” he said.
“I know you don’t always have to be from somewhere, to be effective, but what was happening was that organisations were just coming into communities, trying to solve problems for them, and just kind of missing the beat, missing the cultural understanding of the place.
A screening of the film Postcodes at the Watershed, March 2, 2026, with a panel discussion afterwards, chaired by Joe Sims, left, with Melanie Monaghan from the Hartcliffe and Withywood Community Partnership, filmmaker Neil Maggs and Zak Dugdale, from 224 South Bristol Youth Zone(Image: Bristol Post)
“We lost a lot of what I call community pied pipers – people that have worked in areas for 20, 30, 40 years, and know the uncle, the auntie, the sister and the brother. And that, just by their sheer presence alone, is a mitigating factor against problems.
“I think we kind of need to get back to that a little bit. There’s already the skills, the role models out there. They just may not be working in a professional capacity, and as a community, we need to identify them and support them,” he added.