Introduction

In January 2015, our Education and Outreach Officer Jordon Maynard-Daley met with Anna Cheetham from the Yellow Submarine charity to discuss collaborating on a half term music making project for members of the charities youth group. After a consultation with the young people they decided that they wanted to be involved in a song writing workshop, so we brought in practitioner Ashton Mills to work alongside them on the project.

Context

The Yellow Submarine is a charity that support people with learning needs and disabilities. As part of this they run a lot of holiday activities for children and young people in Oxford and Witney. The charity approached us to see if there was any scope to do some work together and we jumped at the chance to collaborate with them. The project would be a taster session during February Half term 2015, and engage 10 participants that the charity was working with at the time.

The Story

We wanted to deliver a project that would be fun, engaging and enable participants to be inspired and create something new and original.

When we arrived at the centre, the young people greeted us with very positive attitudes as many of them had been looking forward to the session and writing a song.

Ashton Mills was the workshop session music leader and he began by telling the group about his trip to Palestine and a song that he wrote with the community out there. Their song was about their hopes and dreams for the future.

The young people we worked with were inspired by this and began brainstorming their ideas for a song and what they wanted for themselves in the future.

They wrote a song called Maybe, Maybe.

Impact on participants

Please see quotes

Next Steps

This was an amazing project session that we delivered for these young people. The energy they put into the session was inspiring and by the end they felt really excited about what they had created. Proud was the key word they used when we asked them for feedback on the session. 

We would be very keen to return to Yellow Submarine and continue running sessions with their participants. Anna Cheetham who works for the charity has a similar job role to our Education and Outreach Officer. We have agreed to keep in touch with a view to doing more holiday collaborations throughout the year.

Please feel free to download a copy of teh case study for this project below.

Thank you for reading this project log.