Based in Scotland, Jack is interested in creative and collaborative ways of bringing people together. He is the founder and director of the Tinderbox Collective, which has grown into an exciting community of young people, musicians, artists, youth workers and volunteers. His work focuses on supporting children and young people to feel confident, build positive relationships and explore what they have to say through music and the arts.
Jack founded the Tinderbox Collective in 2010. From longstanding youth clubs to different bands and music projects, an alternative orchestra and a digital arts studio, the organisation has a number of strands that all cross over with each other as much as possible. They also work in partnership with a number of schools, hospitals, youth work organisations and support services.
Jack is also a board member of Scotland’s Music Education Partnership Group (MEPG), a membership organisation and national network of people involved in music education in all its forms, and helping to develop We Make Music Scotland as a public facing platform for their work. He is also a co-founder and previous board member of Hidden Door festival, which supports and celebrates emerging artists, musicians, theatre-makers, film-makers and poets. In 2012-13, he took part in a programme called International Creative Entrepreneurs and worked with a number of community activists and organisations in China with whom he is still very close.
He joined the Atlantic Fellows in Social and Economic Equity in 2017-18 to try to gain a better sense of wider economic and structural inequalities affecting many of the young people he works with, and to learn from others involved in different fields and from different countries.
Jack holds a MSc in Inequalities and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
I work with a lot of young people who live in poverty, or who face unfair challenges and disadvantages, and do my best to bring people together and open up opportunities through music and arts. I generally try to make our projects as fun, inclusive, exciting and creative as possible, and help people to build their confidence and achieve things they may never have thought possible.Jack Nissan