StreetVibes Youth is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to inspire, motivate, encourage and support young people to be creative, enterprising and productive.

‘Caribbean Meets Urban Music’ was a music making course that took place over eight sessions, providing opportunities for young people from south London to explore genres of music they wouldn’t normally encounter and develop their music theory and Caribbean composition skills.

Although initial recruitment was good, numbers fluctuated from week to week. After consultation with young people the sessions were re-shaped to focus on the building blocks of the two musical styles, exploring and experimenting with the cross-over and differences of each.

One of these changes included a studio taster session where music leader, Orlando, prepared a standard beat for the group and then showed them how to build a new musical production around the vocals, step by step, using rhythms and sounds inspired by Caribbean music. This was the turning point: not only could the young people see how the musical styles related to one another, but they started to tell their friends, and attendance soon picked up.

At the end of each session, participants went home with the track they had produced, and this encouraged them to experiment with their vocal range and styles and fusing it with music of African and Caribbean heritage.

This new approach excited and enthused the young people and, by the end of the project, there were 28 regular participants.

StreetVibes Youth saw ‘Caribbean Meets Urban Music’ as a great opportunity: they enjoyed the creative challenge, brought an ethnically diverse group together and created some very unique pieces of music that were professionally showcased. It has encouraged StreetVibes to approach other funders and think more broadly about how their approach can be adapted and tailored.

“Keep hold of the idea and develop it, but be flexible about how you deliver it.”

Lessons learnt: