Building bridges to music spaces
Suffolk Artlink Project Officer, Candida Wingate, gives a personal account of her experiences of working on Rock On, a music inclusion project for young people in Suffolk.
I deliver music projects for young people in challenging circumstances – young people who are ‘hard to reach’.
They are hard to reach for any number of socio-economic, cultural, demographic, physical and educational reasons. Many are also hard to reach because they have created a massive safety barrier between themselves and a world they find confusing, restrictive and, ultimately, untrustworthy.
Which is why I can’t do my job by myself. I need partners who know these young people and have their trust; I need other professionals to provide a bridge into their space.
Traditionally, that space has been youth clubs – and who better to be that bridge than the youth workers? With that in mind, we developed Rock On, the most recent music inclusion project from Suffolk Artlink.
Rock On intended to help young people learn and develop technical and social skills and abilities whilst supporting a workforce of tutors and youth workers through training events and the hands-on experience gained in the sessions.
Note the use of the word ‘traditionally’. There have been many changes in youth provision over the last few years, not least the divestment of local authority services.
New social enterprises, with laudable charitable aims and rigorous business plans, now exist, offering a variety of youth services; at times it felt less like a bridge and more like a delicate balancing act – and one I sometimes failed to pull off.
The balancing act was between different priorities and shifting external pressures; it sounds simple now, but maybe I concentrated too much on the areas we had in common and didn’t give sufficient credence to what might jeopardise our shared vision.
Yes, I did a risk assessment – but did I understand my partners well enough to understand fully what might constitute a risk to them? Is that even possible? Or does it come down to how much partners value each other and what they offer young people?
Over the past two years, Rock On has worked with three different youth service providers, with the intention of creating a mutually supportive working partnership.
The idea was that a designated youth worker who, by definition, knew more about the young people and their circumstances, would support the sessions and experience, at first hand, their impact on participants.
Youth workers took part in review and reflection sessions with the tutors, ensuring that everyone was fully involved; Rock On was not ‘done to them’ – it was ‘done with them’.
Not wishing to over-stretch already limited resources, we budgeted for the youth workers’ time. To provide focus, we created observation sheets, based on the project outcomes and asked them to observe participants and note examples relevant to the project’s aims.
Having that sort of framework proved very effective in gathering meaningful information. For example, a youth worker writing that ‘It was lovely to see H. so focused, he generally finds it very difficult to settle down to anything’ was far more informative than my observing that ‘H. spent 25 minutes on the DJ decks’.
In another venue, the youth worker noted that not many young people were having a go on the decks; they came into the ‘music’ room, and then steadfastly refused to take part.
From our perspective, they were as fully engaged as they could be at that stage – one young man actually spent 20 minutes telling me why he wasn’t going to have a go, which in itself was fairly engaged.
On closer observation, you could see that several were singing under their breath, they paused on their phones to listen to the opening bars of the next track and even stopped making derogatory remarks, becoming just mildly insulting rather than downright offensive to one another.
The ‘music’ room increasingly became the place where some young people chose to be. The youth workers saw this – and the effect it had.
‘This gives them a different space to be in. In here, they don’t have to be horrid to each other, they can relax and get away from some of the peer pressure out there.’
One evening, a young and very troubled young woman came into the club. After some encouragement, she spent over an hour drumming, pausing only to ask what something did or to comment on an aspect of her life.
‘For an hour or so, things weren’t quite so grim – she could see there was something she could do,’ observed the tutor.
The supporting youth worker wrote: ‘Doing music gives them another space to be in … It’s like when they get high, it changes their head space. It gives them the choice to not go out and do drugs.’
Rock On also supported a youth festival by providing workshops and a ‘silent disco’. In my day, a disco was for dancing but on this occasion most of the young people sat around in small groups, plugged in to the headphones, swapping channels and sharing different types of music. When asked later what they’d enjoyed, they said they just loved the space to sit and listen and share the music with their friends.
‘It was so relaxing, so cool,’ said one young woman, ‘Just having a space to be together with friends and the music we like.’
Rock On also ran a programme of DJ sessions at a youth club on an isolated army barracks. When asked to comment on how she thought the young people had benefited, the charity manager stated:
‘They have firstly been able to try something totally new and different that we could not ordinarily offer at our clubs. They have grown in confidence, developed new skills and been able to focus on the task. For two young lads particularly they have been less disruptive and found something they enjoyed and got totally immersed in. For others they have learnt new transferable skills.’
Knowing the young people as she does, she is much better placed to make those assessments than I am; to have her acknowledge that this was something ‘new and different that [they] could not ordinarily offer at [their] clubs’ is evidence of the benefits offered by music making to engage young people.
We have been lucky enough to work with some wonderful youth workers, from whom we have gained invaluable knowledge and experience; it has been particularly helpful for tutors in the early stages of their career. As one commented:-
‘Being with the youth workers and talking things through with them really helped, and seeing how they act around the young people, how they deal with some of these issues, it’s all really helped me gain confidence in what I’m doing.’
The respect, it would appear, goes both ways, as a senior youth worker recently wrote about Rock On: -
‘It’s been great to see the young people obviously really enjoying taking part and quickly learning new skills to be proud of … getting to see the effects music has on not only the young person taking part but the ones watching, [they] can be just as involved and enjoying the atmosphere that the music the younger person creates [it] can be very powerful. It has been amazing to watch and be involved with.’
‘It’s so nice to know that they value what we’re doing,’ responded a music tutor.
And there’s your bridge. The youth workers valued what we offer, the young people sensed that and, cautiously, they followed their lead - into a different sort of space, where they could relax and where they had choices.
It’s a space where they dared to have a go at something new, and surprised themselves when they realised they could do it, a space where it was safe to show others what they could do – a space in which they could feel better about themselves and the world around them, if only for an hour or so. Their ‘music space’.
Thank you for inviting me in to that space - I would not have missed it for all the wobbles in the world.
Suffolk Artlink is a participatory arts charity, producing inclusive arts programmes led by experienced arts practitioners and encompassing a rich variety of art forms. Our work is delivered in close partnership with care, education, voluntary and community organisations.