Music Makers Lottery Funding!
- Anna Davies
- Apr 5
- 3 min read
We are happy to report on the amazing news about the funding we have received (£20k) of National Lottery funding to help local young people and families with disabilities in Liverpool.
Our local community Music project, (Music Makers), has been celebrating after being awarded £20,000 in National Lottery funding to support its work with young people living with disabilities. The group, based in Wavertree, Liverpool, have been using the money to run regular Music sessions and support for families in person and on-line.
Music Makers is our longest running project and was founded by Jamie Davies from Emerge Community Arts and Sara Ward who was at that time a social worker and realised that the community was struggling to provide support to local families and their children.
The group now runs a weekly session at a community centre, attended by up to 20 local young people and their families, where they join in with activities such as singing, learning instruments, socialising and sharing their news. The sessions help people to make friends, while learning new skills and having fun. While enjoyable, participants are also gaining greater confidence, self-belief and important collaboration skills.
The funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest community funder in the UK, has seen these sessions run regularly every week and also more opportunities to run special events such as community days. This means that the number of young people able to participate is able to increase as the group raises awareness and invites other families from the community. This is helping them to build relationships with others experiencing the same challenges and hopefully enable them to develop their own support network.
Director Sara Ward, says: “We’re delighted that The National Lottery Community Fund has recognised our work in this way. Now, thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to press on with our plans to broaden the range of opportunities available to local children with disabilities and their parents. This is important because it helps both the children and the parents to build relationships with others facing similar challenges and to create their own supportive circles of friends and peers.”
Lorraine, a parent who attends the weekly group, says: “The music sessions are so important to us as a family. We get to see friends and my son gets to communicate with his friends, it's good to be part of a community with like minded people".
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National Lottery funding by 2030.
As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives.
National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year (2023/24) The National Lottery Community Fund awarded over half a billion pounds (£686.3 million) of life-changing funding to communities across the UK, supporting over 13,700 projects to turn their great ideas into reality.
To get involved in Liverpool Music Makers, contact us at Emerge.
To find out more about the fun visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk
Comments