Voltage Programme: Community Cohesion and Raising the Profile of Young People in the Local Area
Many organisations which Youth Music works with have a strong reputation for not only impacting on the lives of children and young people but also those in the community. They enable and support the fostering of positive relationships between young people and their peers, families, teachers and other professionals.
This page is part of a resource collection for practical guidance around providing volunteering opportunities.
The volunteers in the Youth Music Voltage programme were Young Ambassadors for Music, which meant they took on a pro-active role to increase participation in music making and help to develop cohesion in their communities through music. Supported by staff in the organisations and through partnership with other agencies, volunteers involved in Voltage were involved in a number of community events which raised the profile of the organisation as well as improving perceptions of young people.
Example: Lucky for Some event in Lincolnshire (SoundLINCS)
“Our volunteers wanted to plan and deliver a successful event that engaged the wider community of Market Rasen and create a positive image of young people. By any measuring system applied they achieved this, and received local and national press coverage. We believe that our key principle of empowering young people to be aspirational in their thinking certainly contributed to the success.
The IDEA of an event is sufficiently familiar to most young people for it to be a realistic proposition for them to imagine themselves doing it. This is a little counter-intuitive as planning and delivering a successful event is a complex task with many subsets of activity. The important principle is that young people FEEL that it is something they can do – and want to do. The many subsets of activity provide a broad range of opportunities that can potentially appeal to a wide range of young people’s interests. For example – we found that one young person was very motivated to design flyers but their circumstances prohibited them from getting involved in their distribution. Two other young people, however, lived near the event location and took responsibility for distributing flyers.
Our group of volunteers wanted to arrange a raffle and one young person took the primary responsibility for making it happen. One young person was interested in photography and became the event photographer whilst another was interested in technical sound and oversaw the live sound engineering. These examples evidence that the subsets of activity offer a diverse range of volunteering opportunities that appeal to a wide range of young people’s interests.
Our summary of the ‘what contributed’ would be:
- Offer starting points that volunteers can relate to
- Empower volunteers to bring their aspirational ideas to the starting point
- Develop starting points into projects with many subsets
Young volunteers on the Voltage programme took part in training for the Hate Crime Initiative. This involved details on how to take a report of a Hate Crime incident and indentifying what a Hate Crime is. The volunteers were also involved in writing a bid to the local council’s equality and diversity fund to deliver music making workshops in a local school and a gig to raise awareness of the scheme. The music making workshops proved to be a great success involving members from the Hate Crime department of the West Mercia police authority going in to the school to speak with the participants on what a hate crime means. The workshops produced a song about hate crime which was then played at the Holocaust memorial service, the young volunteers also performed redemption song.
Young people have also worked along the side the council and other partnership agencies involved in a local festival Teenage Kicks which celebrates youth culture. The volunteers invited other young bands and artists to send links to myspace and cd’s of their tracks, they then went on to decide on who would be playing, coordinate the line up and manage the stage during the event.
I believe these activities provide a lasting legacy of the impact the volunteers have had upon the community, the Voltage project is approached by young bands enquiring about playing at Teenage Kicks & at the “Live at the Hive”; gigs that are run and organised by the voltage volunteers at the Hive. The work the young people have done, their commitment, as ambassadors for the Hive and as young volunteers is commended by our partners and other members of the community.
An example of how volunteers supported other young people’s music making, in their local communities
Music4U reported that their Voltage projects have had direct benefits for the local community. In the planning and delivery of their activities, the young volunteers were able to pinpoint the needs of their community and act accordingly. For instance, knowing that ticket costs are often a barrier preventing local young people accessing live music opportunities, both volunteer hubs chose to put on free events. Likewise, the East Riding hub’s studio days were offered free of charge to the bands involved, as they would not otherwise have been able to afford professional studio time. By removing the cost barrier, the volunteers increased the accessibility of music-making opportunities to their local communities and reached those who would not always be able to benefit from arts activity.
Three of the volunteers organised and hosted an acoustic open-mic performance night. In order to encourage and enable wider participation in this event, the volunteers used some of the additional money available to them to purchase a set of ‘house’ instruments, which could be lent to those without access to their own. The second strand of this project involved the volunteers selecting four local bands, that had shown potential and commitment, and arranging for them to have half a day each in the local recording studio, Higher Rhythm. At this studio, the bands received hands-on support in recording their work, professional development and business advice, and the opportunity to be interviewed for and have their work showcased on the studio’s own Sine FM radio shows. Additionally the Voltage evaluator visited one of the recording studio sessions and gave the young people the opportunity to reflect on the benefits and outcomes of their Voltage project.