1
Artists
4
Sessions
9
Participants
4
Tracks

In the lead up to Christmas 2016 OCM partnered with Damascus do deliver a music project for young people in Sutton Courtney.

Introduction

We met Youth worker Roxy Elford from Damascus at the South Oxfordshire and Vale Youth Partnership Steering group meeting in the Autumn of 2016.

Damascus run a weekly youth club session for juniors and seniors on Wednesday evenings in a small village called Sutton Courtney just outside Didcot. 

After meeting with OCM’s Education and Outreach Officer Jordon Maynard-Daley both organisations decided to work on a pilot project which we could use to gauge if there was a need amongst the young people for this sort of activity and if there is we would collaborate on a funding bid to extend the project in 2017.

Context

Once we had met with Damascus we decided that targeting the senior youth group would be the ideal group to work with for this pilot project.

In order to identify what their needs were our Education and Outreach Officer attended one of the youth sessions and consulted with the young people about what OCM could offer and to gauge the interest in a project.

At the consultation session we identified 5 young people that showed a keen interest in the project. They had some previous music making experience on a music project that was run a few years back but nothing since then and they were keen to learn how to produce tracks and write songs.

To support them on this project we brought in Danny Wheeler to deliver a 5 week project with them at the youth club.

The Story

The youth clubs at Damascus only runs for an hour each week which meant session times were a lot shorter that we would normally offer.

Throughout the project we had a core group of 3 lads that attended almost every session we ran. Danny introduced the group to Logic Pro and they were able to design and produce a few compositions.

From time to time we had new members join in on sessions and get creating with the group and at the end we were able to produce 4 music tracks over the life of the project.

Impact on Participants

Young people involved in this project were extremely dedicated and the same young people  attended nearly all of the session we ran. In a short debrief they mentioned that they were keen to continue on the project when it starts up again.

Next Steps

This was a great project to run. Though the cohort was very small and the sessions were short we were able to offer a unique activity for those who got involved in the project.

We would like to continue to work with Damascus and help to nurture this group of music enthusiasts, though we feel we will need to make the sessions at least 90mins long to help add more depth to the sessions and help to challenge the young people.

In January of 2017 we will meet with Damascus to collaborate on a funding bid to support the music sessions going forward.  We are going to speak to Vale of White Horse District Councils Arts development team to see if there is any support we can received from them.

Thank you for reading this case study, if you would like to work with OCM on a music project please contact jordon@ocmevents.org or call 01865 484787.

Damascus Music Project Image 1
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