Introduction

Towards the end of 2014 Oxford Contemporary Music began working with the East Oxford Early Intervention Service and we ran a DJ project in Barton called Scratch.

Since then we were looking for opportunities to continue to work together so that the young people the service work with could continue to engage in music making opportunities.

Context

In January 2015 OCM pitched an idea to the Positive Futures Fund award panel in order to support our plans to deliver Music making activities to young people in Oxford during the school holidays in 2015.

Our pitch and funding bid was successful so we partnered up with the East Oxford Early Intervention service to deliver this project.

The Story

We ran our first project during the Easter Holidays which was a music technology project.

We worked with two groups of young people each day through the second week of the holidays and ran a session with the juniors (8-12yrs) in the morning and the seniors (13-19yrs) in the afternoon.

We set both groups a challenge to create one song each by the end of the week. James Ottley from The Early Intervention Service and Jordon Maynard-Daley OCM Education and Outreach Officer decided to bring back Music Producer Danny Wheeler from the Scratch project to teach them how to make music on the computers.

The project was also an Arts Award Project, so the young people created portfolios of their work as the project progressed. 

Both groups surprised us. Instead of creating just one track each they created 9 tracks each which meant we had two great CD’s created by the end of the week.

We concluded the project with a small sharing event where the young people played their tracks for youth workers and parents that attended.

Impact on participants

Please see quotes

Next Steps

This was the first project we ran with our positive futures funding and it was a huge success.

With regards to next steps we are going to continue to work with the Early Intervention Service, and deliver further projects during the summer holidays and autumn half term of 2015.  Each project will continue to include Arts Award and we will progress the young people to a high level of award each time.

Please feel free to download a copy of this projects case study below and share with your colleagues.

Thank you for taking the time to read this project log.