Grantholder Gathering North West
In May we delivered our first ever Grantholder Gathering in the North West. Our gathering at Band on the Wall (home of great live music for over 200 years) gave us the perfect opportunity to meet new Grantholders, share learning and practice from existing projects and to communicate the important policies and procedures of Youth Music.
The day was a fantastic opportunity for us here at Youth Music to meet the people behind the projects, understand the essential work being delivered, as well as the chance to introduce ourselves on a personal level and let grantholders know who to contact at Youth Music to help support their grant.
We had representation from over 30 diverse organisations in the room working on projects spread across the region from Liverpool, in the South, to the Cumbria borders, in the North, and over the duration of the day we discussed information essential to the administration of Youth Music grants, use of the Quality Framework, the implementation of sound evaluation practices, useful communications tips and how to get the best out of the Youth Music Network.
We also heard about the strategic remit of our Fund C grantholders from Charlie Morrison at Brighter Sound. We even got to demonstrate our rapping skills in the after lunch musical energizer — thanks to Tunde from Contact for facilitating.
Quality and Evaluation
There were some interesting and useful discussions around evidencing the impact and providing a clear focus and structure for professionals in a structured form.
It was suggested that the Quality Framework could be distributed with practitioner contracts and some were using the Framework as a means to engage with schools directly, enabling young people see that projects are actively implementing a framework to engage the best professionals and ensure quality in a more meaningful way.
We discussed the challenges in monitoring for projects and peer-to-peer observations and evaluations between organisations to help mitigate against this. Arts Council England (ACE) highlighted the Cultural Hive, an ACE funded initiative for sharing case studies from projects.
Discussion
As part of the discussion groups we asked attendees to share some honest accounts of their work, recognising the gatherings as an appropriate space to do this. We asked about:
- an element of their work that their organisation does really well
- challenge that their organisation has encountered or an element of their work that their organisation would like to improve
Branding, resourcing and promotion
Grantholders acknowledged that the PR elements of projects needed to be carefully promoted. It was agreed there is no right or wrong way but that understanding where events should be placed, the key influencers and where the audience is for utilising outreach work was important in your approach. Ensuring targeted community/peer tickets, as well as reaching particular communities, conducting relevant workshops and conferences and being careful about who you target your flyers and promotion at was also considered essential by grantholders in the room.
Many recognized issues around uptake being influenced by the locality of the project and whilst promotion can happen within establishments and venues it takes a much longer time to promote via the school environment.
It was also recognized that strengths resided in the recruitment of local musicians and industry leverage. Brand leverage and looking outside of existing networks was seen as a key strength in the reach to and recruitment of young people. This strength reflected the challenge of issues around community style branding and it the importance of looking credible for young people, centering on their aspirations and focus. This could include association with Artists or Football Clubs focusing on the creative output of the sessions such as record making, as opposed to any association with charity or public funding.
As a key part of this approach it’s essential that organisations ensure their projects are perceived in the right way. Avoiding community or council branding, being aware of what branding should be represented on what materials (i.e. no supporter logos on releases and content produced) will give the young people involved a sense of ownership and help inform ongoing recruitment.
Schools
There was agreement that teacher workloads can mean engagement is challenging but identifying roles and responsibilities with partners, as well as resources and staff, equipment can help support this. It was noted that projects required the flexibility to see what/who works best in a particular context but it was also recognized that utilising different tactics to break down barriers and suspicion (such as jamming sessions with teachers) helped to integrate the creative activity within schools.
Grantholders noted they had experienced success in working with schools by developing strong working relationships with key staff. Access to schools had also been gained by working with the Arts Development Officer, where applicable, at the local council department. Elsewhere Grantholders found that adopting a multi-pronged approach to engaging with schools helped to break down barriers to participation.
Staff and participant retention
Grantholders noted that being aware of cultural differences in behavior and dress and knowing how to manage them within the context of their participants was essential in engaging groups from different cultural backgrounds (such as Czech Roma or Congolese) and challenging traditional concepts of working with these groups.
It was also recognized that from time to time projects would encounter serious challenges around managing staff and it was essential for project coordinators to understand the practicalities and decision making process in knowing when to develop and manage the human resources aspect of the project and when to readjust it.
What next?
Some of the other key issues discussed included the role played by and the involvement of parents and using Arts Award as an effective tool, but not a catch all for every participant.
We highlighted that attendees work in cross cultural environments and must be ready to deliver and be creative about the different ways in which to way to engage different communities.
There was an agreed commitment to share knowledge, expertise and best practice on challenges and strengths and whilst our gathering at Band on the Wall had provided an excellent forum for this to happen we looked forward to continuing the conversation online, via the Youth Music Network in our North West Regional Discussion Group.