Ace Music Therapy CIC provides individual and group music therapy services to children and adults of all ages and abilities. Music therapy is a psychological therapy which involves the use of music to achieve therapeutic aims such as developing communication skills, providing an outlet for emotional expression, developing social interaction, building self-confidence and many more. All our music therapists are registered with the Health Care Professions Council and have enhanced level DBS checks.
How would you describe your organisation? We are a community interest company. We provide music therapy in a variety of different environments including schools, hospices, hospitals, care homes, individual homes and community settings.
What’s your social mission? We believe in the transformative power of music and our mission is to transform as many lives as possible.
Tell us a bit more about your social purpose? We work with clients of all ages and abilities, those affected by disability, illness, mental health and those who are vulnerable. We use music as a tool to facilitate change and develop skills through the therapeutic relationship and musical interactions. We believe that everyone is musical and has an innate response to music and we use each individual’s musicality as a way of connecting to enable everyone to join in no matter how able or disabled they are.
We want to set up lots of groups in order to transform as many lives as possible and are currently in the process of setting up an under 5s group for children with disabilities and their parents as well as a group for homeless people. In the future, as we grow as an organisation, we hope to be able to provide music therapy session at a reduced cost to enable those on low incomes to access our therapies.
What’s your track record – what do you clients say? What contracts or awards have you won? We have an excellent track record working with a variety of schools and a children’s hospice and an adult hospice. We always use feedback forms and get excellent feedback from clients and parents/carers alike. Our music therapy work has been featured on BBC Radio Essex. The work highlighted on the radio was individual music therapy sessions with a young adult who had a life-limiting disability – Muscular Dystrophy. He used the music therapy sessions as an outlet to express his emotions and also to develop his confidence. Family members and nurses noticed how his confidence grew over the course of the sessions and he began to use his voice more speaking to them, whereas before he had presented as being very withdrawn. He also used the sessions to write a song for a girl he had strong feelings for. He was able to express his feelings through music and reflect on them with the therapist in a safe space. We recorded the song on a CD which the client was able to keep and share with whoever he wanted to share it with. Furthermore, the young adult also learnt in music therapy what he could do independently, he was able to see that he could make music by himself as long as the instruments were placed in the optimum position for him. Sessions took place at St Francis Hospice and were generously funded by Jessie’s Fund.
Have you attended any Essex Social Enterprise Network events? If so what did you learn from taking part? Yes. I attended the Essex Social Enterprise Network networking event and the planning for growth workshop. The events were a great opportunity to meet with other like-minded social entrepreneurs as it can be quite isolating running a social enterprise by yourself. I very much enjoyed the talk at the networking event, it gave me lots of food for thought in terms of how we evaluate our work and service and how we communicate our outcomes to the public. I found the planning for growth workshop extremely useful with regards to creating a business plan and how to think about the future. As a creative person, I can honestly say I am not very ‘business-minded’ so this workshop helped me to develop confidence and learn techniques in order to help my business grow. I would recommend the ESEN events to anyone interested in setting up a social enterprise and anyone with an established social enterprise as they are an excellent opportunity to share ideas and to network.