Making Your Mark
Learn to play the ukulele, or brush up on your skills - come join our Ukulele Sessions in Bognor Regis and Selsey.
Funded by the Sussex Community Foundation, Making Your Mark aims to combat social isolation and promote positive mental health by helping people to learn or brush up on their ukulele skills.
Our popular Making Your Mark in Bognor Regis returns the third Wednesday of every month between 10am and 12 noon in the Waverley Function Room on West Bognor Regis Seafront.
For just £2, you can get all the tea and coffee you want! If you don't own a ukulele, don't worry as there will be some there for you to try and buy if you want to, and when the session is finished, you’ll be very welcome to stay on for the regular `Waverley Ukulele Jam` at the same venue between 1pm and 3pm.
Our popular Making Your Mark, Selsey, takes place between 10.30am and 12 noon at Selsey Private Club on a monthly basis.
Keep in touch by joining our mailing list: Southdowns Music Festival
FamyShanty
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.
With thanks to Mark Lake from Sounds Of Music for his help with delivering this project.
View and download the songs for the forthcoming sessions:
Leave Her Johnny
Randy Dandy
South Australia
The Worst Old Ship
Billy Riley
Fish In The Sea
Homeward Bound
Wellerman Sea Shanty
View guided videos via our YouTube channel.
Shanty Heads
Say hello to Shanty Heads!
The Shanty Heads Project was launched as part of our 2021 festival with an aim to help combat mental illness and stress through the medium of shanty singing with a mixed gender group of participants across the community. Due to the success of the project, we are now continuing the sessions throughout 2022.
Within the Arun district it has been well documented that we have a higher-than-average amount of deprivation and mental illness.
Clearly there are no quick solutions to this but Shanty Heads seeks to make a contribution to help improve what is happening in the area. By focussing on a specific and enjoyable experience, the confidence, self-image and social skills of those taking part should improve by creating a sense of achievement. This hopefully will be important to their future well-being and prospects going forward.
The intention is to run a set of free monthly shanty singing workshops through 2022 in Bognor Regis. Our thanks go out to Bognor Radio Respect Adapts Hub CIC and the Bognor RAFA Club who are two of the organisations that are fully supporting the project moving forward.
Next session: at the RAFA Club, Bognor Regis, 10.30 to 12.30pm.
