Intro
The mission of the Back Door Music Project is to help develop the youth of Rochdale Borough by providing them with opportunities to express, learn and develop musical skills. To enable them to use these skills to achieve the best they can in terms of employment, careers, education and enjoyment.
We also provide a social outlet for these young people rather than street corners and regularly attract 100/150 young people along to our venue. We organise band nights for young people from the age of 13 years upwards on a monthly basis in order that they can experience and take part in all aspects of the event. Also once a month we hold what we call the 'Mosh Pit' (which is a street name for a type of music not catered for elsewhere in the Rochdale area, this mainly consists of Rock, Punk, Ska in all its various forms.) and because of the age group they are unable to use other venues.
The workshops are run by two freelance musicians who have trained as community tutors, we also have a part time co-ordinator who runs and develops the project. The workshops at the moment are run twice weekly when funding allows along with outreach work.
We have volunteers who have come through the project as participants and are now helping others within the workshop environment. We have worked with Youth Services and we have been engaged for the year on the PAYP program and we are also ran a project with Revitalising Inner Rochdale, which enabled us to establish our project.
We have received funding from Connexions over the last two years and have been working with young people referred to us from them. These workshops are based around computers and music and we have found that this has been a successful way of introducing young people to IT etc. We have also had young people referred to us from Heywood and Middleton who we have been unable to take before due to the postcode issue.
We have been supporting the development of a young band in Middleton with workers from Youth Service based at Rhodes. We have moved our project to a place that is larger and more accessible in order for us to take larger groups, and increased our access to new technology through the funding received last year.
We have moved into areas such as Littleborough that are suffering from youth nuisance through the lack of facilities available to them and through links made with the Youth service officers and the police we are about to start new events in the Pennine Area. The outreach work done through LNF funding has helped to create this new initiative and further funding of a co-ordinator role will allow it to continue as an avenue for young people to access our services.
We feel that we would make a difference to young people who cannot envisage going on to further education but if we can give them a start, albeit at a grass roots level, we can give them the encouragement and support needed for some of them to see a future. This will help them in:
- Basic skills. Literacy, Numeracy.
- Social skills
- I.T Skills.
- Confidence building.
- Self Esteem.
- Employment/education possibilities.
We feel our project will reach some of the criteria set in the Rochdale Neighbourhood Renewal plan as Rochdale has been identified as one of the most deprived LEAs in England. We look towards the local priorities of Pride of Place and a Wider View leading our goals for the project The aims of The Back Door Music Project are:
- To create a combined teaching and social facility.
- To be able to teach groups of young people and increase their access to knowledge and skills range being catered for at the moment.
- To continue be able to engage people who are disadvantaged or marginalized.
- To continue to engage new volunteers because of longer accessibility to learning facilities.
- Work with the young people to provide the experiences they feel that would benefit them and allow them to be creative.
- To become a self sufficient and sustainable resource
- To be able to continue the work we have started in a professional manner.
- To support the young people with advice and help through various partnerships such as further learning, community work or paid work.
- To continue working with the links made through the project.
We have live band nights which gives young people from the course the opportunity to take part in setting up the events, by setting up the stage, operating the sound desk, and working with 'professionals', promotion and taking responsibility for an event.
All these things are part and parcel of our project and young people have taken part in this, some longer than others. Over the last four years we have held approx 96 events with between 80 and 120 young people attending the events.
We also take part in other events, Arts Festivals etc and the young people and new bands have had the opportunity to have a stage to perform on whereas because of the sort of music they identify with they would not normally be given this chance. Also three of the young bands who have used our facility have now gone onto the band circuit and are playing at events elsewhere. One band 'Hollywood Ending' has gained a contract with Mighty Atom records and had a CD.