IAYO Youth Work Updates

Below Allin Gray, IAYO CEO and Rachel Dunne Lambe, IAYO Youth Participation Officer, discuss the exciting developments in IAYO youth work.

We are delighted to announce that IAYO has received funding from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth through the Youth Services Grant Scheme to expand our work in promoting the youth voice and leadership in IAYO and youth orchestras around Ireland. We will have two staff working on the programme from January 2025 to deliver a programme that will include the youth subcommittee of the board, young board members, formalisation of the stage and backstage management by young people at the Festival of Youth Orchestras, mentoring and leadership programmes in our ensembles, outreach to young musicians in other genres, a national conference for young orchestral musicians, and training for our core and artistic staff and board and for member orchestras on best practice and youth-work approaches to working with young musicians.

The expanded programme of work will also allow us to support a group of young people to create a social media campaign promoting participation in youth orchestras and ensembles. This was an area of development that was indicated as relevant through our engagement with younger members. We will also be building on last years outreach activities at the Festival of Youth Orchestras which saw young musicians, not currently involved in classical music, attend the afternoon concert and embark on a behind the scenes tour of the NCH.

Our Journey so Far:

The extra-musical benefits of orchestral and ensemble music-making have been part of the dialogue of IAYO since its foundation and of our founding members for before that. However, we have not always approached these benefits in a structured way and have not always been in the habit of consulting the young people themselves on how best to realise these benefits. Our journey towards our youth work programme began with advice in 2008 to engage with the National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) to help develop our work in that direction. We became associate members of NYCI in 2009 and full members in 2016 and have had consistent engagement with NYCI since then, including participation in the Youth Arts Matters gatherings to bring young people and politicians together for performances and dialogue about the value of youth arts, participation by our staff in NYCI’s Youth Arts Summer Schools, engagement with the NYCI / Cork ETB Youth Arts Hub in Cork, and participation in the Specialist Organisations group of NYCI.

In 2015, on foot of a discussion with the head of De Unges Orkesterforbund, the Norwegian youth orchestra federation, we brought three young people on to the board of IAYO. We arranged mentorships for the young board members, but those did not work quite as we envisaged. Consequently, although the young people were very positive about the experience, they took part more as observers than participants and were not empowered to influence our work
as we had hoped. To change this, we sought a youth worker to come on the board who would get to know the organisation and guide us on how to move forward. With the help of NYCI, Fiona Creedon, now the Wicklow Youth Officer, came aboard and designed a pilot programme for making youth work central to our work as part of our 2021-2024 strategy. To implement this part of the strategy, we engaged an experienced youth worker, Rachel Dunne Lambe, as our parttime Youth Participation Officer in 2022. Rachel has dug into all of our own activities, engaged with our member orchestras and youth orchestra organisations internationally, and helped set up the programmes that we are now moving forward.

Making youth work a central principle of our work and focusing first on the wellbeing and personal and social development of young people will mean that those young people will have the best possible experience in their ensemble music making. We are also confident that a youth work focus will lead to even higher levels of performance excellence.

You can find details of the plan for 2024-2025 at iayo.ie/youthwork.