Burn is a project by Youth House Leuven (youth service of Leuven) in cooperation with VZW Straatrijk, Urban Woorden and MijnLeuven (Burn, 2018). Urban Woorden is a socio-cultural organisation that was founded in 2009 by young people from Leuven with a passion for poetry, rap and performance (OPEK-Urban Woorden, 2018). Running since 2008, VZW Straatrijk meanwhile is a socio-cultural association that recognises urban culture as a fully fledged art form and focuses on hip-hop culture & urban dance in all its forms (VZW Straatrijk, 2018). Since 2014, Burn has been established as a project which combines the interests of all of these different organisations.
During their youth, two organisers of Burn were looking for leisure activities relating to urban arts since nothing like this was available in Leuven at the time. This lead them to start 'UrbanWoorden' and 'Straatrijk' themselves and later on Burn was born, to provide leisure activities for other young people seeking same sore of leisure opportunities. All the organisers started as volunteers working for Burn and afterwards, they got subsidies from the Flemish Government. Currently, Jasper, Jeroen and Elise are paid by the city of Leuven. The other eight organisers either work as volunteers for Burn or are doing an internship (currently Tevin). It all naturally grew based on the need of youth of the city of Leuven. Burn is funded by the city of Leuven and gets some subsidies from the Flemish Government.
Together, the organisers provide several activities for young people in Leuven. Burn offers different urban arts workshops such as breakdance, hip hop courses, rap, singing, beatmaking, and slam poetry. They focus on young people aged from 12 until 20 years old (Burn, 2018), however most activities are attended by 15-19 year olds. There are also people attending Burn who are older but it is uncommon and the older people (max. 24 years old) who do still come, come because they were there from the beginning of Burn.
Burn wants to focus on implementing a unique concept of ‘supervised practice’ in which youth can develop their own passions and talent (Burn, 2018). They try to be accessible to as many people as possible. The organisation does not ask for money, nor do the participants need to subscribe and instead it is an open organisation which can be attended whenever a participant wants. In this way, Burn is reaching a diverse public from different social and cultural backgrounds. The organisation tries to empower young people by giving them the freedom to learn what they actually want. On the one hand, Burn likes to work in an atmosphere where there is no pressure and where everyone feels comfortable. On the other hand, Burn works towards engagement and tries work towards a final performance if that is something that the young people want too (Burn, 2018). In the video below, you can see a performance called Burn Urban Festival which takes place during the summer holiday.