Sing to Change Team Wins
‘This Is Not A Rehearsal’ Award
Project Partners Lincolnshire Music Service, The Come and Sing Company, and Scruffy Bear Media received the ‘This is Not A Rehearsal’ award at the 2024 Music Mark Annual Conference in Nottingham, UK on Monday night.
The Music Mark Awards reflect on the achievements of the Music Mark members helping to provide inclusive, accessible, and high-quality music education for young people throughout the UK.
The ‘This Is Not A Rehearsal’ sustainability award focuses on the climate crisis and celebrates the work being done to highlight challenges, react artistically, and lead the way in enacting creative solutions in how music education responds to climate issues.
‘Sing to Change: Boston 2 Boston‘ brought together 1,500 primary school children from Boston (UK) and Boston (USA), encouraging dialogue about climate change and the effect on their futures. The children spent months rehearsing a moving performance of the song ‘Change’ by eco-musician Dane Myers. Their performances were then turned into a music video.
Darren S Cook and Nicky Hagan of Scruffy Bear Media filmed the project from start to finish. They interviewed scientists and project collaborators to highlight the message of the project. The Sing to Change documentary about the whole process premiered in June 2024.
The project created a legacy of high-quality educational and musical resources. Those include free full scores and arrangements of ‘Change’ for other choirs to use, and information on climate change for schools to use as part of their curriculum.
The aim was to inspire other choirs from across the globe to continue discussions amongst young people about climate issues and the need for change.
Project Lead Elenor Bowers-Jolley said,
“This project has been an absolute joy to be part of from start to finish and I am thrilled that it has been recognized by Music Mark in this way! And coming alongside being a finalist for ‘Outstanding Musical Initiative’ at the Music and Drama Education Awards, and ‘Corporate Cause’ at the Smiley Charity Film Awards, it galvanizes us to keep moving forward! This isn’t the end of it for us – we need to continue having these important discussions with our young people, so we are already in the planning phase of Sing to Change 2.0 – watch this space!”
We are incredibly grateful to the participating schools and our team – including key partner, US not-for-profit Sea Us Rise – for their hard work and commitment to the project to make it such a success. Receiving this incredible accolade gives added motivation to continue to push forward with the Sing to Change initiative. We are more than ready to start the next stage. This time, our focus will be on food scarcity, poverty and biodiversity loss, as well as sustainable agriculture.
For more information on the project, which is supported by the Arts Council through a National Lottery Project Grant, visit Sing to Change.
Contact details: info.singtochange@gmail.com
