Thank you so much to all of you who have shared our campaign to #SaveOnlyBoysAloud and to everyone who made a donation over the past 3 months. We have felt supported and encouraged by people around the world throughout this difficult time. Although we fell short of our initial target, we have reached an amount that enables us to make plans to start activity again in the autumn.
Over the last few months, we have been working hard to fundraise and come up with ideas about what Aloud will look like from now on. As part of this, we have visited several different music and arts organisations across the UK to see how they run things, and this has helped us develop a new approach to test. Our work must be sustainable for the future, which will support young people to keep singing for many years to come.
Despite fundraising a considerable amount of money, making staff redundancies in the organisation and making cuts across all our activity, we are not able to continue to run how we have always done. Our costs and overheads have risen considerably and the competition for grants income for charities is unprecedented at this time.
We have decided to pilot our new approach in south east Wales first, where OBA was initially started. This will give us the chance to see how things work before hopefully rolling it out to other areas of Wales.
This means that in the autumn, we will be running the following in south east Wales:
- Only Boys Aloud: Free weekly rehearsals for young men aged 11-19
- Aloud Voices: Paid weekly rehearsals of mixed voices for children and young people
All the choirs will be led by our Aloud choir leaders. They will be joined by a team of local volunteers, supporting us in each area to help with the running of the choir and to develop connections in each local community.
If you would like to volunteer at your local Only Boys Aloud rehearsal, or support our activity in another way, please contact: [email protected]
We are heartbroken that the way forward for Aloud at the moment means that we will be letting some of our members and their families down in North and West Wales, and we are sorry to those of you that this is going to impact. But we know that to make things work, we have to start small and grow again. We are however pleased that The Aloud Charity still exists to be able to support young people to sing in some areas and hope that we can still deliver workshops and other Aloud projects across Wales. Once we know that our new model works and generates the income we need to continue, we will look at how we can roll this out more widely.
Thank you for standing by our side through this difficult time and for giving your unwavering support to our young people and our team. We couldn’t have done it without you.
