Thank you National Lottery!
We recently received a note from The National Lottery Awards For All:
“We’re really happy to tell you we will be funding your project following your application for National Lottery Awards for All. And we want to give `FamyShanty` £9300 to help your community thrive.”
FamyShanty is a new and exciting out-reach project closely linked to the 2022 Southdowns Folk Festival which aims to bring local families closer together and help improve mental well-being through the medium of acoustic music and the growingly popular genre of Shanty singing.
It is a well documented fact that the Covid Pandemic has put a lot of pressure on families and has had an increasingly negative impact on mental health. The fact that the Pandemic has gone on longer than thought, has only made this situation worse, and younger people of school age have in many ways been impacted the worst. Therefore, with the help of a range of partners, plus a local music shop who will provide hire instruments at significantly reduced cost plus tutoring input, ‘FamyShanty’ aims to provide a platform for children and their parents to work together using different instruments and singing styles loosely based around Shanty and ‘Songs from the Sea’.
The project will be located in a local primary school plus other appropriate and accessible venues and will run every month between February and October 2022 and will be an integral part of the Southdowns Music Festival to include key performances and workshops at different festival venues around Bognor Regis. There will also be Zoom and other online sessions the extent of which will depend on how the pandemic changes and alters.
Our project partners will play the leading part in publicising it plus recruiting appropriate participants from amongst the ‘harder to reach’ and more ‘vulnerable’ members of the local community. It is envisaged that each monthly session will have a maximum of 30 people so as to provide closer learning support, as well as a safer Covid environment in which all safety protocols will be followed.
If you’d like to be involved, please contact rnash10@hotmail.com for more details.