Any final thoughts?
While our project revolved around music, it was a music project, not a health project. We didn’t start out using music as a therapeutic tool to make people feel better. There were therapeutic elements to the project and people got a lot of joy when the participated but that wasn’t the purpose of this project.
The women carers made the choices to talk about the ideas and issues they wanted to talk about. That is important to repeat that because it was central to the success of this project and our previous projects. There is also a great legacy of the project in photographs, recorded original songs as well as podcasts.
Where to now?
We tend to work with members. That is people who attend the Newington Day Centre. They come in have lunch and then participate in an activity. That might be Armchair Aerobics, it could be a quiz, something like that. In our case it is general reminiscence and then live music. The other projects are with carers. So we have two very distinct cohorts of people, and two very different project styles that we work with. We are hoping to get funding later on this year to work again with the carers.
The project we are working on at the moment is funded by the LFT foundation and they are funding us to work with the members (Bring Me Sunshine) . And that project takes place at Newington Day Centre which acts as a hub where people come in from other centres because Newington has the facilities to allow space for projects.
The other thing we are doing is working with new facilitators, training two people to work in this particular area, and then eventually take them to other centres which might not get access to these types of programmes.
This work can be very challenging at times but it also offers fantastic rewards and I feel very privileged to do this type of work.
A report on the project can be read at the following link:
Happy Together Older Carers Project with Newington Day Centre_External Evaluation (pdf)
