Young Hustlers is the family arm of The Hustle Collective, running annually since 2017 alongside Hockley Hustle in the neighbouring Sneinton Market Avenues. For children aged 0 to 16, the festival offers a full day of live performances, interactive workshops, parade processions, music-making sessions, and energetic parties - all for just £4 a child.

The programme spans everything from Djembe drumming and samba dancing to Lego Club, vinyl pressing, poetry sessions, circus skills, and family raves. Each year centres on a theme - recent editions have explored global cultures under the banner "Around the World" - and the lineup is deliberately built around voices and traditions that children in Nottingham might not otherwise encounter. Brazilian headdress-making sits next to Zimbabwean thumb piano workshops and Bhangra Tots sessions, all within a short walk of each other.

Young Hustlers was born from a simple observation: the city's biggest music festivals were overwhelmingly adult spaces. The Hustle Collective launched the family strand in 2017 to ensure that the same quality of creative experience available to adults was also accessible to Nottingham's children and young people - at a price that didn't exclude anyone.

The festival is directed by Saziso Phiri, a Nottingham-based curator, cultural programmer, and founder of The Anti Gallery. Under his leadership, the programme has expanded significantly, earning a 130% uplift in Arts Council England funding in 2025 following eight consecutive years of positive impact across the city's diverse communities.

Independent research conducted by Nottingham Trent University found that 87% of children who participated in Young Hustlers workshops reported increased confidence. Attendance grew by 27% in 2024 alone, with 45 young people given paid performance opportunities. The festival runs active outreach programmes with schools - including Djanogly Academy - bringing world music workshops into the classroom in the weeks before the event.

Young Hustlers isn't just a children's festival. It's one of Nottingham's most effective tools for cultural inclusion: bringing families from ethnic minority and low-income backgrounds into arts spaces that might otherwise feel inaccessible, and giving the city's youngest residents a sense of ownership over their creative community.