Youth and Music

YOUTH AND MUSIC COMMITTEE REPORT TO CLUB ASSEMBLY

JUNE 2019

In the coming year the Youth Activities and Music Committee hopes to maintain and enhance the fine musical tradition that we have for so long upheld within the Club, and we have ambitious plans to develop our youth programmes.

The main musical events will still centre on our Seasonal Concerts in November and on our Music Festival in March (this will be the 30^th running of each of the events). These both regularly attract hundreds of young people to participate. Invitations have already gone out to schools for this year’s Seasonal Concerts and we will be concentrating on approaching secondary schools to attract new entrants in the 2020 Music Festival. We will be asking the club to designate some funds to support the Seasonal Concerts, and then the Music Festival, as we did last year. The outcome was that the designated funds were not required for the Seasonal Concerts which contributed some thousands of pounds to the benevolent fund, nor for the Music Festival, which achieved a surplus in 2019 with the help of sponsorship. Putting on events of this type is not a risk-free exercise as we are often committed to costs such as coach travel and deposits for venues in advance of receiving any revenue from ticket sales. It is possible that the Music Festival, with or without sponsorship, will require benevolent fund money to support it and I ask the club to agree to that support at this Club Assembly. This is particularly the case because of increased charges from Castle Theatre in 2020. The committee will actively seek solutions to this problem.

We will ask the club to support donations for musical activities in the area that are considered by the committee to be of sufficient merit.

Youth activities have also been well supported by our club over the years, and we will sponsor Young Chef, Youth Speaks and Young Writer if we find there is sufficient uptake from the schools. More than this, in 2018/19 we supported the Peace Advocacy project in conjunction with Sir Christopher Hatton School and we want to develop this further. We also want to sponsor a new Rotaract Club based in or around Wellingborough. We have a good relationship with Young Citizen Service through Nigel Anderson to help achieve these ambitious aims.

This is also an opportunity to thank the committee members for all their hard work this year, and to thank all club members for their support and participation in our programme. The help from all has ensured the continuing success of our musical activities which remain the best of Rotary musical events nationally. We are also now setting youth project standards that are recognised as Rotary GB&I beacons.

Finally, we have been concentrating on achieving continuity for all these important aspects of our club’s activities and I am pleased to say that Lorna Brown has agreed to chair the committee from 2020, and to coordinate with Joan Barrett for Seasonal Concerts.

Richard Rowlatt

Committee Chair 2019/20