Enable2 supported the first sessions of the Millside Centre’s recruitment and training for their community choir earlier in 2018. The feedback from those who engaged with and attended the choir was so positive that Enable2 wanted to help with a further 14 sessions, with an objective to particularly engage those members of the community who are hardest to reach and may potentially benefit from the therapeutic effects of coming together in a group.
Helen Hoyle, Enable2 Social Return Manager explains what they set out to achieve:
“We are focused on the multi-cultural communities of Bradford who we support with interpreting and translation services; we know these communities well and know there are more ‘hard to reach’ community members who would enjoy Millside Voices if they could be engaged. Although during these further sessions we didn’t reach as many of those as we’d hoped, we did engage 29 people, and there are plans for this work to continue.”
Furaha Mussanzi, Centre Manager for the Millside Centre told us how “friendships have thrived” within the choir and what they’ve achieved:
“We’ve explored vocal techniques in more depth and worked on activities that encourage confidence building in both the singing and speaking voice. We had a brilliant end of term celebration with over 25 people of all ages, many languages and social backgrounds. We shared and celebrated songs that were festive and celebrate faith.”
Feedback from participants has been positive, about the singing but also the social, and wellbeing, aspects of the group:
“Meeting new international friends. Learning songs in other languages improved my voice. Relaxing.”
“Like the way we sing songs from different countries, we feel more confident that everyone is sharing their own song! I like the harmonies, helped me to sing better.”
What the last two series of Millside Voices choir sessions have proved is that this is an extremely successful group for increasing participants’ wellbeing and building friendships across the community. But there are still lessons to learn from the work needed on further engagement. Furaha explains:
“Engagement of the harder to reach members needs a lot more time and commitment and individual attention to explore what barriers they may face in attending. An outreach strategy has been put in place to liaise with organisations that can bring along people, such as support staff agencies. We now have an exceptional music practitioner, Tom Clegg who brings many years of experience of leading community music groups with harder to reach people within the community.”
Enable2 are very pleased to report that Millside Voices will therefore continue, and they have now secured some more funding. “We are so glad we could help them to get started,” says Helen at Enable2.