Established in July 2019 Dementia Sings Out was created by Trustee Ruth Bowe after watching the BBC programme ‘Our Dementia Choir’ with Vicky McClure sparked an idea of developing this in the local Wellingborough community.
Ruth was already running a successful community choir and approached choir director Gareth Fuller who was instantly on board with creating something special knowing the power of music and the positive impact it creates for wellbeing.
We had a wonderful outpouring of support and enlisted an incredible group of volunteers who all carried out Dementia Friends awareness training support our choir members, and over the years this amazing team has grown and their help is absolutely invaluable in running the sessions each week.
We became a registered charity and over the past few years have been lucky enough to received support from fundraising, local donors, organisations, the National Lottery Community Fund and Northamptonshire Community Foundation to enable us to continue to provide free weekly sessions.
As we began to build our community we were hit by the pandemic and had to get creative as to how we could continue to share what had become such an important part of the week for so many people to look forward to.
We established an online solution and streamed live every week to create consistency and the opportunity for people to still have their weekly dose of joy, which became even more important during such isolating times. Through this unexpected route an additional element was created where family members could join from anywhere in the country / world to share the joy and see family members when this wasn’t possible due to restrictions which created so many moments of joy and connection.
To this day we offer this unique opportunity, continuing to stream our sessions live on Zoom enabling the Dementia Sings Out magic to be spread far and wide by those who are not local, those who are not able to attend in person and family members who through this are able to share time with loved ones.
Thanks to all of the support from the community we now regularly have an attendance of 140 people on a Thursday morning creating magic through music.
It’s been quite the journey and we are so proud to have created a community choir where so many people find joy, support and friendship to boost their wellbeing – there is no better place to be on a Thursday morning than the Dementia Sings Out party!
Head over to our testimonials page and look through our wonderful picture gallery (a huge thank you to valued friend and incredible photographer Charlie Ward) to see examples of the fun we have!