Hands Of, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, has been awarded a two-year grant from Youth Music’s Catalyser Fund. Totalling £100,000, the funding will help to sustain and scale up the charity’s work providing music, arts and education opportunities for children across the region. This is realised by working together with schools, heritage organisations, archival institutions and artists to create immersive projects that connect children with their local area. A wide range of programmes focus on topics such as the area’s mining history, shipping on the River Tyne, the Northumberland Space Programme, and lightships off the Northumberland coast. Working alongside professional musicians, artists and theatre-makers, the children create artistic responses to their experiences through music, art and drama.
Hand Of was founded in 2011 by Louise Snape and Rob Hughes as a charitable events organisation, putting on accessible arts and cultural events for the local community. The couple transformed neglected heritage spaces into music venues for live performances and concerts, including an archaic cutlery factory, a ramshackle shop front, and a 1920s derelict cinema. A series of workshops across local schools followed, and the project has now reached well over 1,000 children.
Snape, who is the project’s Artistic Director, said: ‘Youth Music’s Catalyser Grant marks a vital turning point for us as a charity, as the communities we work with have become more dependent on the support we offer to children and young people since the pandemic and we want to be able to meet the demand. Youth Music are making incredibly valuable work possible. For a lot of the young people we work with, their music session or performance workshop with our artists is their most cherished time, and is the reason they get out of bed. What they achieve with us as young artists gives them hope for what they can achieve in the future, whether that's within the arts or in a totally different sector.’
Hand Of has also recently been awarded a Doctoral Project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. Snape said, ‘From 2025–28 a PhD candidate at Durham University will examine our impact, as a way to help propagate evidence-based interventions like ours elsewhere. This research will be published in 2028, and will be shared widely within the creative arts, education and health sectors in our region and beyond.’
Youth Music’s Sound of the Next Generation (SONG) report outlines that children in the north-east are among the least likely in England to feel supported when making music (52%), and are nearly a fifth less likely to be playing an instrument than those in London. As well as this, in the north-east, 89% of all constituencies have at least one in four children growing up in poverty (North East Child Poverty Commission). Ceitidh Mac, one of Hand Of’s workshop leaders, and a professional singer and cellist, said, ‘What we’re doing is about so much more than music and performance, it’s about giving young people the confidence and the skills to pursue their ambitions, and to have a chance and building a happy life for themselves. That’s why funding this work will always remain really, really important.’
