Rural Isolation, Digital Inclusion and Corporate Social Responsibility

Hello YM Network,

I wonder if anyone could point me in the right direction with a challenge we are having at AudioActive? We’re trying to address our observations that the average skill/knowledge levels (in this case around music production/tech.) of rurally isolated young people is often somewhat behind that of young people of an equivalent age in urban areas.

Hello YM Network,

We think that one of the reasons for this is that these young people simply have less encounters and interaction with contemporaries, practitioners and artists who are at a higher skill level than them. We think that if we can increase these interactions, it will help raise the bar for these young people and help them advance, kind of in the same way that playing sport against someone who is a stronger player than you can raise your game.

Our response to this is ‘Sound Without Borders’ a strand within 'The Lab' one of Youth Music funded programmes based in Rye, East Sussex. We are trying to exploit ‘E-Jamming’ Technology to help participants to collaborate in real time with other young people through our partnerships and an online network. Furthermore, we think that the screen sharing capabilities of E-Jamming have untapped educational potential and we want to explore the scope for remotely facilitated production master classes that could be run by leading sound technologists (theoretically) from anywhere in the world.

The problem that we are having is connectivity. Our current internet connection isn’t providing the capacity we need and other providers can’t guarantee this on a new contract either. We’ve started looking into costs for a bonded line, which should suffice but all of the quotes we’ve had are unaffordable.

At this point I feel that because of the charitable status of AudioActive and the largely social and digital inclusion aims of Sound Without Borders, we would be a good candidate for a company like BT, Virgin, Orange etc to support us through their CSR work but I am finding it impossible to get to speak to the right people at the said companies.

Does anyone:

a) have a contact within External Relations or Corporate Social Responsibility dept of an internet provider that they would be willing to share?

b) have any other ideas around how to get round this problem? E.g. a specific funding pot or technical idea?

c) have similar experience in this area and are willing to offer some advice?

Any help would be greatly received. Furthermore once we have overcome this little hurdle, if there are any projects out there that would like to collaborate with us through e-jamming we'd love to hear from you!

Cheers,

Adam :)