National Lottery -funded music training sessions for carers

We are delighted to have secured funding from the National Lottery’s Community Fund! Thanks to this funding, we are now able to offer free music-making training courses for carers of people living with dementia.

Open Strings Music will be offering their ‘Music as a Relational Tool: Training for Carers’ sessions throughout Brighton and Hove from 2019 to 2020. Whilst the dates and locations for all four session blocks are still being finalised, the first block of sessions will run on Wednesdays, and be held at Brook Mead, Albion Street. The first session will be a focus group for attendees to input their ideas, held on the 3rd of April, from 2pm to 3.30pm. The following training sessions will be on the 24th of April and the 15th of May from 2pm to 4pm.

The sessions are funded by The National Lottery, so therefore completely free to attend, and are suitable for family or professional carers. The aim of the sessions is to help carers use music-making to connect with people living with dementia. No experience is necessary, and attendees will be supported to explore the benefits and practicalities of making music together, in an informal environment.

The project was piloted in 2018 as part of Sing and Play, Open Strings Music’s NHS-funded music project for people living with dementia and their carers. A previous attendee described the session as containing “Lots of ideas and inspiration. I was making it complicated, in my mind, and it’s not! It feels doable now”. Another attendee said that they gained “Confidence in leading a session, new games and exercises, and a thirst for developing this area of practice.”

OSM director Bela Emerson, professional cellist and Goldsmiths University of London community music lecturer says, “Research shows that making music together increases people’s quality of life, and helps carers communicate with their loved ones in a new way”.

For more information about OSM’s free music-making training course for carers of people living with dementia, as well as further sessions and events, search ‘Open Strings Music’, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, along with the Open Strings Music website.

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