Culture, Arts and Refugees

Project: Refugee Platform (Generation, Share it Far and Wide)
Town/region: Birmingham, England
Implementing Agency: Sound It Out and Artsites

Project Focus:

Refugee Platform was a series of interlinked initiatives with multiple objectives to:

• Enable refugee and asylum seekers who were professional world musicians to shadow British artists and gain workshop experience in community music.
• Help refugee and asylum seeker music professionals into work through mentoring and introducing them to potential employers.
• Run music workshops with refugee and asylum seeker children and other young people to enable them to share their experiences and express themselves.
  

Background:

Sound It Out is a community music organisation based in Birmingham.
Artsites is an arts organisation promoting arts activity in five community venues across Birmingham. Informal dialogue between Clare Smith at Sound It Out and the Midlands Refugee Council resulted in a series of referrals for refugees and asylum seekers to the community music organisation. It became apparent that the exiled musicians wanted to perform again but needed support with career development and opportunities to showcase their work. Sound It Out was additionally developing work in primary schools which involved refugee and asylum seeker children.The work organically grew into a programme of activities with the career development and mentoring of the musicians feeding into small-scale performances and the schools programme.

Participants:

The project worked with:

• Tar Player and Setar Player from Iran
• Keyboardist and two violinists from Kurdistan
• Soprano from Russia
• Soprano from The Philippines
• Pianist from Kazakhstan
• Djembe player, a vocalist and guitarist from the Democratic Republic of Congo
• 60 primary school children
• 50 non-refugee and asylum seeker musicians
  

Activities:

• Professional refugee and asylum seeker musicians shadowed other artists, shared their musical styles and gained workshop skills.
• Career support provided to refugee artists in the form of mentoring and introductions to employers.
• Music workshops were held in two schools in Birmingham including both long-term and one-off input by refugee artists.
• Small-scale performance platforms were provided for refugees and asylum seekers at Birmingham music venues. This included Live Connections - Sound it Out's 10th Anniversary performance. Share it Far and Wide evolved from two programmes: Sing it Near, Sing It Farwas the first programme that enabled refugee musicians to shadow other artists. Play it near,Play it Far developed this work so that refugee musicians from the first phase were engaged as full artists and were shadowed by other refugee artists whom they supported and mentored. Generation was a course with three Youth Music Action Zones training world musicians in the basics of leading music workshops.Refugees and asylum seekers worked alongside other artists and comprised around 40 per cent of the group.This involvement of refugees and asylum seekers in the Generation course stemmed from a project called The Saturday Club that prepared them for entry into further professional training.

Outcomes:

• Enabled refugees and asylum seekers to gain skills and exchange musical styles by working alongside shadow artists.
• Refugee musicians gained experience of running workshops.
• Refugees and asylum seekers improved their language skills and developed their vocational vocabulary.
• Provided contacts for employment and mentored refugees and asylum seekers through career development/employer introductions.
• Refugee artists became lead artists and mentored other refugees and asylum seekers through the process.
• Refugee musicians gained confidence in being and feeling part of a community.
• Refugee musicians had opportunities for performance exposure.
• Children, especially refugee and asylum seekers children, gained validation for and a sense of pride in their cultures.
• All participating musicians said they gained skills in working effectively with children who had English as a second language, and who had experienced trauma.
• All participating musicians learned to sing in different languages and to make music in different ways.
  

Sources:

Research interview with Director of Sound It Out and project leaders. V
ideo interview with project leaders, participants and stakeholders.

Contact details:

Sound it Out Community Music

The Arch, Unit G9
48-52 Floodgate Street
Birmingham B5 5SL
Tel: +44 (0) 121 773 7322
E: enquiries@sounditout.co.uk
www.sounditout.co.uk

ArtSites

mac, Cannon Hill Park,
Birmingham B12 9QH
Tel: +44 (0) 121 440 5213
E: admin@artSites.org.uk
www.artsitesbirmingham.org.uk