Fleetwood Stages – Creating sustainable projects

It’s one thing to be able to arrive somewhere and deliver a music project with your own staff, the next step is to be able to create a sustainable project that can continue to exist after your organisation’s involvement has ended. 

One of our Youth Music Fund C outcomes is to help partner organisations create sustainable projects that have the potential to continue after the initial project has come to an end.  The challenge is to create an infrastructure and newly trained music leaders with the confidence and skills to carry it on. It’s also important to build links with other partners with the ability to contribute to this continuation.

In Fleetwood in Lancashire, we have run several projects in the last few years at Milton Street YPS Centre.  The most recent two projects, running from October 2015 to August 2016, sought to establish a sustainable future.

Alongside our music leader, we employed a local music teacher with extensive classroom experience and expertise working with the county music service, but less experience of a community music setting. He does run his own focussed rock school nights as part of his own business but this is a more formal environment with less of a youth work element.

The project was aimed at 12-18 year olds, learning to play as a band and ultimately working towards performing at their own gig. We also wanted to complete a number of Bronze Arts Awards.

To achieve the latter, we discussed how we would implement the evidencing in the sessions. Working with challenging young people with often-short attention spans is a challenge when just focussed on engaging them in musicmaking activities. Trying to also include Arts Award work can disrupt sessions and put young people off returning.

To overcome this, the YPS Centre manager was going to be present for all sessions and was happy to take on the Arts Award documentation with the young people while they weren’t engaged in musicmaking. We gave her an overview of Bronze Arts Award and instructions of what was required from the young people. The More Music music leader is a trained Bronze Arts Award adviser so was able to oversee the process while being able to remain primarily focussed on the music sessions. In the end, the young people completed 6 Bronze Arts Awards, a significant achievement.

The centre had some musical equipment but not much so we had to bring instruments from Morecambe every week and bring it back, as it was needed for our in-house sessions. The youth worker passed on details of a YPS fund we could apply to fund instrument purchases. Our application was successful, giving us £2000 to spend to fully kit out two practice rooms that could remain permanently set up at the centre in unused spaces upstairs.

In the summer prior to the end of the project, participants from Fleetwood came to a young person’s gig at More Music’ venue The Hothouse, part of our Stages project which has a gig every term.  They got to see young people the same age as themselves performing on a professional stage and to a high standard, often playing songs they had written themselves. This was an inspiring visit for them as they got to see what was achievable for them.  In future, the hope is that a band or performer from Fleetwood will be able to come and perform at a Stages gig. The project culminated with a performance at Milton Street YPS Centre

After our project ended, we were able to connect the YPS centre with Lancashire Music Service, who had funding from Lancashire Music Hub to deliver cold spot work.  The YPS found extra funding too and so the project was able to continue, building on the foundations we had created with a local music leader, new musical equipment and experience of Arts Award delivery. We had also facilitated the new link between the YPS in Fleetwood and Lancashire Music Service. 

We hope to stay connected to the project by inviting young people to perform at our gigs and providing training opportunities for new Fleetwood music leaders.

Find out more about More Music at www.moremusic.org.uk

Written by Education and Inclusion Manager Darren Leadsom.