Guests at our recent President’s Awards event were moved to tears by a performance of You’ll Never Walk Alone by a young singer accompanied by Matt Baker at the piano. The performance was developed through the Theatre in the Quarter project, which has benefited from a CCF small grant.
Theatre in the Quarter already offers meaningful, in-depth, arts engagement opportunities to a diverse range of young people and their families in Cheshire. With the help of a CCF grant, those opportunities were extended to newly arrived families from Ukraine and elsewhere, for whom language might be a barrier to engagement.
The project has fostered and promoted social cohesion by enabling young people from very different backgrounds to work, play and produce high quality content together. Following the project many of the young people went on to take part in the Chester Mystery Plays and other cultural activity around the city. By engaging in these aspirational, cultural activities the young people and their families are building civic pride and positively impacting the wider community. It really is a life-enriching experience for all those involved and even the audience, as we found at our event, where there was not a dry eye in the house!