MUSIC PROJECTS IN THE SOUTH EAST GET BOOST WITH GRANTS OF £522,000 FROM YOUTH MUSIC CHARITY

                              

Rockinghorse Children’s Charity awarded £56,600 grant for unique hospitals project

Music-making across the South East received a boost earlier this week (Monday 18 March) when Youth Music announced grants totalling £522,000 for music projects in the region.  Organisations benefiting under the Youth Music Programme included a unique hospitals project by Rockinghorse Children’s Charity in Brighton and Hastings.

Youth Music is the leading UK charity supporting life-changing music experiences and learning for children and young people.  The £4.5m will be spent by music organisations helping young people with least opportunity access music provision. These include young people at risk of exclusion, children in care, those coping with disability and young people living in urban deprivation or rural isolation. 

Over the last year, Youth Music supported in excess of 380 projects benefiting more than 110,000 young people and children – the highest number ever.  This brings the total number helped by Youth Music to 2.5 million.  Grants have been made available across all musical genres from opera to hip-hop.

Child patients with complex health needs in The Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital (the Alex), Brighton and the Conquest Hospital in St Leonards-on-sea, Hastings are set to benefit from a unique project to improve their well-being through music-making activities. Rockinghorse Children’s Charity have been given a Youth Music grant of £56,600 to enhance the children’s well-being through lyric writing, improvisation, vocal work, soothing sounds and playing music together.  The money will also be used to help develop the highly skilled workforce needed to deliver the project.

Rockinghorse CEO Ryan Heal says: “Rockinghorse is delighted to have been awarded this grant from Youth Music to enable children from across the county to benefit from music therapy. This will be hugely beneficial for patients at the Alex and The Conquest Hospital and we look forward to working with the team at Rhythmix to make this possible.”

Youth Music Executive Director Matt Griffith says: “We are delighted to support Rockinghorse Children’s Charity to support young people in the South East.  We know that music captures the imagination of children and young people in a way that other learning often doesn’t and the benefits of their participation go way beyond developing musical skills. These benefits can include greater social and team working skills as well as enhanced self-esteem. We wish Rockinghorse Children’s Charity every success with their very worthwhile project.”

 

Sussex business gets a boost from Theo!

Chichester based business The Lunchbox Store, got a much sought after boost from ex Dragons’ Den Star and retail guru Theo Paphitis on Monday night by winning an SBS award! The SBS award is a weekly Twitter phenomenon that Theo Paphitis started in October 2010 as his way of helping promote and encourage small businesses across the country.

On Sunday night along with nearly 1000 other businesses, Barry Smyth owner of The Lunchbox Store tweeted the famous entrepreneur in the hope of gaining a magic ‘re-tweet’ and joining the ever growing network of SBS winners.

On Monday evening Barry’s goal finally came to fruition when Theo Paphitis re-tweeted his winning tweet to his army of over 330,000 followers:

@TheoPaphitis Providing a One Stop Shop with exquisite customer service for all things Lunch on the Go www.thelunchboxstore.co.uk #SBS #bizitalk

Barry says of his win “From very small beginnings we are aiming to be the UK's number one destination for lunch-on-the-go products. Social media has played a key part in our growth, and we are hoping that our SBS win and the support of Theo Paphitis, will push us to a significant increase in business over the coming months.”

The Lunchbox Store was born after Barry was made redundant from his 20 year career in the newspaper industry in 2010. Using the redundancy to reassess what would be best for his young family, he and his wife who was already enrolled on ‘return to teaching’ course, decided that Barry would start the business alongside his new ‘stay at home’ dad role!

It has been a fantastic decision so far, as not only is The Lunchbox Store growing steadily, Barry has started a second business www.kimochis.co.uk which sells educational toys designed to help children better understand their feelings and emotions.

Now, with this acknowledgement from such a well-known retail entrepreneur, 2013 is shaping up to be very interesting for this enterprising dad of four!