We All Make Music was a music education festival, with inclusion at the heart.
The event took place in London in March 2018 and was the culmination of three year’s of strategic work to boost inclusivity within music education.
It kicked off with a protest song and included a live jam with every member of the audience – reflecting the name of the event and the Drake Music inclusive approach to music-making.
It also covered the Social Model of Disability, different approaches to using technology to make music education accessible and more.
We were delighted to be joined by 125 people committed to making change in music education and to being part of a movement towards a truly inclusive approach.
We All Make Music Guide
During our three year strategic programme we carried out research which shone a light onto the under-representation of Disabled people within the music education workforce.
We campaigned to change that within the music ed sector and we also worked hard to make our team more diverse and representative. As part of this we decided to pull together resources and share our learning from this process.
For many years our team was made up largely of non-disabled practitioners. In other words, we were programming and delivering music-making opportunities FOR Disabled people. We recognised that there was a need to evolve a more collaborative approach. We needed to be programming and delivering music-making opportunities WITH, ALONGSIDE and BY Disabled people.
Our progress towards a more diverse workforce has been underway for some time, but accelerated with the Think2020 programme and we are pleased to share some of the learning we gathered along the way.
The WAMM Guide includes tips, advice, links and resources to help you diversify your workforce now and to support young Disabled people to become music leaders in the future.
We asked all our attendees to share with us a commitment they would make to inclusive music going forward… a change they were prepared to implement inspired by the event.
We also asked Matt Griffiths, Chief Executive of funders Youth Music, to carry out an observation role on the day of the event – watching and sharing his thoughts at the end of the day with our attendees.
We were also delighted to read two blogs from attendees following WAMM2018:
Illustration: Lewis Heriz
Images: Henry Woodley
Film: Nick Harsant
Podcast: Shipshape Marketing