Speaker 2 (00:00.248)
Hello everyone and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. I'm Maria and today I'm speaking with Jamie Read, partnership and inclusion manager at Berkshire Music Trust. Jamie, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Thank you Maria, I'm really well thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me.

My pleasure. Well, thank you for having me because we are here today at Berkshire Music Trust Centre. I did not know you were this central in Reading. You are just off Prospect Park.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're tucked on the same campus as Prospect School, King's Academy Prospect School, but we're a separate building just on the same campus here.

Yeah, it's a lovely location.

Speaker 1 (00:32.182)
Yeah it is, it's really handy as you say, it's super easy on public transport, loads of free parking, got electric vehicle charging points, we've got the works!

Which I think leads nicely into what is Berkshire Music Trust?

Sure, essentially our mission is to make music for everyone. So we are a music education hub and our whole goal is to bring the joy of music and music making and learning music into people's lives wherever they are across the county of Berkshire, but our HQ is here in Reading.

Talk to your music trust as we discussed before, that is your current name, but you've gone through bit of an evolution with the name, which I find fascinating, so could you give a bit of background to that?

Yeah, for sure. So we became an independent charity back in 1982, so quite a long time ago, and at that point it was Berkshire Young Musicians Trust. We now work with adults and people across the community, so the young has gone, but it had a moment in the middle for a number of decades where it was known as Berkshire Maestros, which lots of people still refer to it as Maestros. We rebranded away from that about three years ago now because we are a really inclusive organisation. We want to make music for and with

Speaker 1 (01:35.52)
everybody and give everyone that joy that making music brings into people's lives because more people want to learn music than do, right? People kind of go, yeah, I really want to do that, but they feel like it's not for them. And as part of that journey towards being more inclusive, the word maestros has this sort of connotation of, you know, when you picture a maestro, you see really immediately someone in a tuxedo with a baton or a violin or something, you know, it just, it conjures that almost Tom and Jerry's sort of style musician.

We make fantastic classical music and we have incredible orchestras and brilliant people working in that space and we value and love them very, very much. We also have work going on in every musical genre you can think of with every instrument you can think of and probably some you can't. And Maestro's didn't really serve that inclusive sense. So our wonderful chief exec, Dawn Wren, went through a process a few years ago of taking the organisation on a big rebrand towards this more inclusive, more community centred organisation.

love what you've done there because like we said, the word maestro, it's just one word, but instantly it can alienate a whole group of people and they're the exact audience that you want to attract.

Yeah, absolutely that. The last thing you want is another barrier to access. There's enough of that in the world as it is. So trying to get rid of that in the branding and in the sense of actually this belongs to everybody.

makes more inclusive, which links into your role, is partnership and inclusion manager. So how did you get into the role?

Speaker 1 (02:55.374)
Well, I've had a background so I've worked in arts education and charity for about the last 26, 27 years. Originally my career was as a performer so I'm a singer, dancer, actor so I did the whole kind of West End musicals and all that sort of thing and worked as a performer and then started teaching quite early in my career and found a real passion for developing other artists and creative people and helping them on their journey. I've worked in various drama schools and then for 13 years I ran a charity in the Reading area that was called Reed College Access to the Arts which was

about creating parity of access for people in the art space in general. And then after a little while of working freelance for myself, I'd done that for a long time and kind of did the sort of midlife freelance creative thing. went, no, I've got a desk and a job and I know everything that's going to happen. That's awful. So I went off and freelanced for a bit and went, yeah, this is not as fun as it was when I was in my twenties. I don't want to do that now. And then this wonderful job came up here, which I've been able to kind of grow and shape with me and bring my experience of working in arts education and music charities, but not specifically within

sort of a county music service if you like which is traditionally what this organization was many years ago. So I've been able to bring experience but also a different perspective and a different outlook I think which has been really wonderful to do.

Clearly we're then in the right place at the right time because this world is perfect for you, given your background and experience already in arts and culture.

absolutely love it. love the organisation, I love the people in it, but doing the job is such a joy, which is a really nice thing to get up in the morning and say.

Speaker 2 (04:18.733)
So what does your job as partnership and inclusion manager include? What do you do, the typical things, what are your activities?

So the nutshell answer is I'm the everything else guy. What I think are all the weird and wonderful and excellent and cool and interesting corners of music making. Principally in the partnership side, one of our roles as a music hub is to help foster new creative music organizations, grassroots organizations, music practitioners, people who are just coming through in their career and help them on their journey. So the community partnerships aspect, which I look after is going out and finding those people, letting people know that

actually, if you're a musician, music practitioner and you want to create and go on a bit of a journey and try some things and you need some support around you, we can create that support and that environment to help people on that journey. So I look for those people and nurture them, bring them into the organization and kind of see how we can work in partnership with them. And also in that community's partnership aspect, a look at how we work with local businesses, small businesses in the area, how we can support them and they can support us. Arts venues, we've...

recently started a partnership with the biscuit factory in Reading, how we can support them and work together with them. So that area is really lovely and really varied and really different and I love people. Give me a room full of people and it's my actor thing, right? Give me an audience and I'm happy for hours. So being in that space and being able to go out networking and talk about what we do and meet interesting people and see how there's some kind of cool vibe between us is that part of it. And then the inclusion side is looking at how we serve communities who we traditionally haven't served.

as well as we might have done. So that's everything from setting up projects with young people with special educational needs. We have the UK's second only inclusive musical instrument library, which is full of incredible tech that helps people with profound and multiple learning disabilities to actually have meaningful music making activities and not just be given a maraca and have someone play an instrument at them. You know, they can kind of really get involved in stuff, which is beautiful. We run dementia cafes, Parkinson's drumming sessions. We are working with Reading Refugee Support Group to put together a project for asylum seekers at the moment.

Speaker 1 (06:20.962)
So all kinds of really beautiful project-based work that really helps to use music as a community-making tool to bring people together around that communal language of music.

you do so much. mean this is all across Berkshire as we've said before and I know you've already touched upon a little bit there what you do for people in Reading. Could you give an overview what you do for people in Reading, what you offer, what people are interested in, that you know people you want to attract?

Yeah, for sure. So there's sort of three areas of the work really. So our schools team who are phenomenal, we do a lot of the first access programs in schools. So if you have a child who is year three, year four, and they've come home with a violin or a ukulele or something, I'm really sorry, that's probably our fault. It's really lovely work because it gets kids involved in music making from an early stage. So we have literally tens of thousands of musical instruments in our resources department that come in at the end of the school year in July, get refurbished.

recycled, cleaned, sorted, repackaged and go back out to the schools again for those whole class projects. So the thousands and thousands of young people and instruments working in that space. We have our music centers. So in Reading, we've got our main HQ Reading music center here. And we also have a music center that operates at the New River Academy School on Richfield Avenue. So we're in there a couple of evenings a week. And in the music centers, people can come and learn instruments, singing.

in ensembles, so small bands and groups and orchestras and choirs and that kind of thing. And that's really open for anybody. That's adults and children, any level, any stage, go onto the website and register and say, I'm interested in learning this. And then our brilliant admissions officer, Catherine, will then find you a place somewhere in one of the music centers. We also have those centers dotted about across the county from Bracknell in the east to Platram in West Berkshire. So yeah, we have the music centers aspect of the work and then the communities aspect, which is us going out to meet people where they are and

Speaker 1 (08:10.274)
Ideally partner with other charities and organisations who don't fall into the schools or the private provision space but kind of go, actually we want to do something here, how can we make it work?

find that bit, the partnership and that you're going out to these different businesses and doing collaborations, I find that fascinating. So could you give an overview on how you approach people, the types of collaborations that you suggest, because you've got to be suggesting things when you approach people and how you collaborate with them.

Yeah, absolutely. The way that we approach them, I guess, is we're trying to just be noisier in the space about the fact that we actually do this work. So there's that. So we've got lovely people like you, Marie, who can kind of, you know, shout a little bit about what we're doing in that space. And I do quite a lot of networking in the area. I'll turn up anywhere if there's an opportunity to meet people and have a chat to them about what we do. But the kind of collaborations are quite broad. So, for example, one of the things that we've recently started doing that we delivered last week...

is we do team building days for local small businesses and networking groups. So we did a ukulele workshop for a group of small businesses who wanted to come and just do something a bit different, get out of the office, meet each other. They all went to the pub afterwards because we're not far from the cunning man. I'm glad to say they went afterwards and not before though. And they had an hour's music session of just jamming on the ukulele. Some of them could already play, some of them were like, I absolutely can't play, I don't know what you're talking about or why I'm doing this. And by the end of it, they were all playing Riptide and having a bit of a giggle and it was really fun.

nourishing thing. And something like that in the corporate partnerships and the small business partnerships, the money that they paid to take part in the activity is then funneled back into our inclusion and partnerships budget to then support work with the refugees and asylum seekers and what have you. So that helps to fund projects. So the money goes around twice, which is really lovely. In terms of the actual community work, we're always looking for other charities, community interest companies, organizations in the area who think that actually they want to find some new activity for their participants.

Speaker 1 (09:58.968)
So we've worked with parents and children together doing an early years project. We're working with Lower Early Library and also a lot of libraries over in the west of the county to create music in the libraries for people struggling with social isolation who are feeling kind of cut off and lonely. We work with Age UK around dementia cafes and also Bluebird Care as well out in the west of the county. So those kinds of organizations where people think actually I can really see that there might be something we could do here and we don't know how to approach it. They don't want to bring in just a musician, but if they do,

the support and what that's going to look like and how they're going to plan the project isn't there. The nice thing with working with us as the music trust is that all of our staff are fully qualified and trained and insured. They're all safeguarded and got every possible bit of safeguarding training and paperwork. You've got the full support of the admin team and the marketing team and the management team to help spearhead the project so we can kind of really help to make stuff happen for people.

Do you need to have or set yourself boundaries? Because music is one of those things that can be applicable to anything. But obviously you've got a small team, you've got a limited fund, limited time. So do you have to set those boundaries and how do you go about doing that?

We do, and I think that's mostly set by time, the amount of staff hours we've got, because everybody has got so much will, just people really want to get in the space and make the music, which is really lovely. Time is hard, we're constantly short-staffed and recruiting for more musicians, and again, the community partnership thing of bringing through new practitioners is a really lovely piece of the work, because we're also solving part of the problem on the way through that. And unfortunately, like all charities at the moment, budget as well is one of the boundaries where we have to kind of

see when we can get funding for projects to go through but if I had my way we'd be everywhere all the time! But at the moment we're doing, in the musical communities aspect of the work, we're doing about 20 hours of projects a week at the moment across the county and taking on new stuff to be able to of grow that work all the time. Across the music trust in general we've just passed I think about three and a half thousand people on the role doing various projects and music lessons and things with us as of this term so it's yeah there's a lot happening.

Speaker 2 (12:04.652)
You mentioned the challenge there that I think every charity that I've spoken to, don't know any that aren't, which is funding. I know it's such an issue. I think your suggestion and what you already do with having corporate events where they can come, they can pay you for a service that they need is a good one. Do you have any other suggestions, things that you've tried, any other ideas to tap that nutshell?

Yeah, mean certainly one of the things that we've started doing the building here as you've seen, if people haven't been to Ready Music Centre and want to come and pay a visit and have a look around, we've got probably 12 or 13 teaching rooms downstairs and then we've got four huge ensemble rooms that we run our orchestras and things in and those are available for rent during the day for conferences and events and if people want to use a space it's much lower cost than anywhere else around that we've found but again the money goes into the pot to support the charitable aims of the organisation which is great.

And also the partnership working aspect with a lot of the grants when we're applying for funding for specific projects, what they really like to see is that there's a wide range of beneficiaries and that you're working with other organisations in tandem. So that's where working with other charities is so helpful that if we are kind of serving the same aims, but coming together around something, we can support each other with the funding, with the funding bids. And that generally tends to land a bit better with the funders as well.

I imagine when dealing with funders, you need to be so clear and concise on your impact because everything nowadays is how much change are you making, what impact. Do you have specific measurements? Is it the number of events that you do, the number of students? How do you measure your impact?

So it depends on the area of work actually. So for me and my aspect of the business and what we do, there's a kind of a social impact of saying actually what are the kind of long-term changes that people are seeing in their lives. So we're looking at case studies and how we're recording case studies at the moment and hearing people's stories of actually I engaged with this project and it took me to here and because of that I'm now here. And so it's looking at that kind of social impact because music is an amazing way to build community.

Speaker 1 (14:02.254)
It's a great socialization tool. in a post COVID world for young people who may be in their early life, really struggled to meet other people their age, coming together in a band is a really great way to do that because you've got a common interest, you've got a communal language and it's a great social tool in that sense. So yeah, a lot of it really is that that kind of social impact, that social change, what are we doing in the community that's making a difference to the lives of the people within it? But then you're quite right. Sometimes it's the number of people. How many people have we actually, you know, impacted in this piece of work?

or quantifying it in terms of the financial impact that it's had in terms of the return on investment for what the donor has given to us to deliver the project. So it's quite varied and you're right, you have to really be on the case with that. We're very lucky within the leadership team, within the management team, we've got our fundraising manager who is kind of across a lot of that area of the work and also our chief exec and the leadership team and myself are kind of all plugged into the funding aspects of our various areas of the business. So it's a real team effort, which is great.

I love this idea of case studies, social change over a period of time, because you're absolutely right, frequently you can go, you can say, yes, I did a project, there were three people, there were 10 people, 20 people, whatever the number is, in an activity, but then that's lovely, but what impact does that make beyond they had a lovely time for two hours? I know it's challenging, but you're right, if you can, measuring over a prolonged period of time, or showing how they can take certain skills on is important.

Yeah, absolutely. And qualitative data rather than quantitative. You know, it's not necessarily about bums on seats. It's what the bums did next. And how much of a change, you know, the music has been able to make. We do some really great work in what's called AP and PRU settings. So AP is alternative provision. So where young people might be struggling in mainstream education settings, AP settings provide a different way of educating young people that's more holistic and more pupil-centered and more one-to-one.

And then the PRUs, the PRUs, the people referral units where young people who've been temporarily or permanently excluded from school go into these kind of settings and actually seeing the difference where a young person feels disenfranchised and they feel that their voice isn't being heard and they feel that society isn't serving them and their default position is to want to fight against something because that's what's been demonstrated to them throughout their life. That actually if you can go in with music, we have a fantastic digital music program called Mixmaker run by my colleague Joe.

Speaker 1 (16:24.748)
which allows young people to sit in front of a laptop with a set of headphones on like we have now and start making a piece of music. It gives them the skills to do that. They've got complete control over their environment, what it sounds like, what they want to say. And it gives those young people a voice. It gives them a chance to express how they feel without having to sit in a therapy setting and say it. They can actually make the piece of music that expresses their emotions. It gives them autonomy over something and it gives them a voice and it makes them feel heard. And that's a really, really terrific aspect of the work that it's hard to

quantify that but you can, when you've got those case studies and you can talk to the young people and go how did that make you feel? can talk to the leaders of those organisations and yeah we've really seen a change in this young person who wouldn't engage and then they came for 15 minutes and then left and slammed the door and the next week they came for an hour but then swore at everybody and by the end of the term they've gone actually I've made a piece of music here. That's massive progress in the context of their lives.

I think the key thing is you've got to be, as you said correctly, think at the start, you've got to be so vocal about what you do and the impact that you make and tell everyone because the more people that know, the easier it is. Whereas if you don't really tell anyone, it's just a report every now and then, it's very hard to communicate exactly that point. It was very interesting what you said about how you deal with some challenging students, some situations. What training out of interest do you give your staff? Because I imagine that most people find they've got an interest in music, but

dealing with others and how they cope, must be challenging. I wonder where to start with that. Do you train them or how does that work?

Yeah, so that's something new that we've started to bring in actually is inclusion training for our staff to help. And we just had two courses running over one day around something called Social and Emotional Mental Health, SEMH, supporting our staff to understand what that looks like and why children might present challenging behavior, a whole area of work for those of us working more deeply in that area around trauma-informed practice and trauma in children's lives, what that looks like.

Speaker 1 (18:17.962)
and how that actually impacts their behaviour and how they will present in the classroom. And it's really important to understand because certainly for me, you know, I'm in my late 40s and when I was at school, the behaviour was never separated from the child. You are a naughty child is what you were told, you you don't fit the standard pedagogical model of I've got the information, I've given it to you, if you can give it back to me, you win at life, which is not true, but that's kind of how school was set up to operate. And actually understanding that the behaviour is not the child, the behaviour is coming from something. What's underneath that? I wonder why you're...

feeling like that, I wonder why you're behaving like that, what's the why behind it? Music is a great thing to get into that little crack and just open it up a little bit and find the human inside of it and give them the ability to express themselves in a meaningful and safe and profound way.

Is there anything that you would like to leave our listeners with today? Any final thoughts? Anything like

I think the final thought is that our strap-mine is making music for everyone and it literally is for everyone. There's no such thing as somebody who can't make music, there's just someone who hasn't made music yet. Lots of people have been told, often subliminally, this is not for you, you you go and do something else, mime in the school choir, all that sort of nonsense. If you want to get involved, whether you're an adult, a child, whether you want to learn to sing, play a stringed instrument, orchestral instrument, digital music, there's something for you at Barking Music Trust and we want to support you and we want to take you on that journey, so...

Yeah, hit us up.

Speaker 2 (19:38.382)
Jamie, thank you so much. This has been brilliant. And yes, everyone, I will put details on the website, but get in touch with Berkshire Music Travel.

Thank you Maria.