OUR PROJECTS
ARTIST DEVELOPMENT
For Young People
Working with young artists at JusB Youth Charity
Since the start of 2022 we’ve had the pleasure of working with JusB, an independent, community-based charity serving young people in Bromley.
For this artist development programme we worked with JusB and artist and producer Damien Cooke to sign-up young people aged 17-25 with bags of raw music talent. This spanned from interests pursuing rap, R&B and grime, to vocalists and self-taught producers. With the guidance of music leaders, Damien, Barbara and Annabell, the group delivered stand-out performances throughout the project from BR1 Lates to The Fellowship with Lewisham Music. They also had the exciting opportunity to visit local radio station BMC Radio in Brixton to showcase their tracks and create a radio show.
Participants reported their creativity had increased by 76% by the end of the project, with 40% of participants saying that their creativity, motivation, agency and music skills had increased by 100% as a result of taking part in this project.
"Witnessing the talents of Jus B group was very beautiful and inspiring. I had a sense of pride when seeing the growth of some of the students and when seeing them performing live. They were a special group with strong personalities and identities. I hope they’re going to continue pursuing their musical path."
— Music Leader, Barbara
Find out more about the project on our JusB blog post.
Check out one of their tracks below on Soundcloud:
For Our Team
From ArtsTrain’s early years we have proudly supported a developing community of inspirational music artists and leaders across South East London. Supporting our music leaders to develop their skills in facilitation as well as develop their own career as artists is really important to us – it benefits them and benefits the project. There are lots of ways in which we build this into our projects:
All of our projects are led by at least two artists, this may be one or two lead artists and a younger/less experienced assistant who is learning on the job.
We proactively select and put together artists from very different musical backgrounds so each will learn from the other and a wider range of genres/skills will be represented in the project for the benefit of young people.
We always build in paid planning and reflection time to our projects so artists can meet each other, prep properly and debrief after sessions.
Creative Professional Development
We also build in training and development opportunities over the year in our programme. Each artist who works with us for longer than 3 months is offered a training bursary towards training and development in their artistic or facilitative practice. Many of our artists use this bursary on ‘skills swaps’ with each other – learning vocal or recording techniques for instance, or developing skills in software packages such as logic or Sibelius.
We also supporting our artists to develop their creative practice, build their networks and secure funding to drive their own creative projects. We run yearly careers workshops with key music funders such as Arts Council PRS for Music Foundation and Help Musicians UK.
In 2019 we were supported by Cause4 to lead on this work across South East London and we ran four open funding and development networking sessions to over 40 artists which included those key funders as well as basic training on writing budgets, project planning and jargon busting!
In the last few years, our artists have been successful in applying to PRS Foundation and Arts Council for their own projects, further contributing to the artistic ecosystem in this part of outer London.
