Rhythmix is a music, social welfare and education charity who believe in the power of music to transform peoples lives. Well back in April @ The Crypt event, Lucy Stone pitched for Rhythmix and although they didn’t win the pot of money on the night, they didn’t leave us empty handed. Here’s what Lucy wanted to tell us about the the experience:

“Everyone comes away from BrightonSoup smiling, happy to be part of a community that has supported a charity. But people naturally feel bad that they can’t give to all of the groups who come to Soup. Well, we’re here to tell you that as a “losing” charity, we came away smiling from Soup too, even if we didn’t get the pot of money on the night.

We presented at BrightonSoup a few months back, with the aims of getting computers or money for tech in our office. As a charity, we work to transform the lives of vulnerable people through music. We make music with children in hospitals, older people with dementia and things like supporting young people who’ve been excluded from school in getting their first qualification.

But, as a grant funded charity, our funders don’t like us spending money on some of the basic things we need when we could be putting that money towards helping more people make music. We do understand why, but this led to a dire state of our office equipment. We had outdated computers, screaming laptops and broken keyboards. It was impossible to work when our PC’s would crash 10 times a day, or there was no delete key on a keyboard. We may have been at the cutting edge of music education, but our office was stuck in the past.

At soup we asked for support for new technology.
But we got so much more!

Thank you to everyone who’s helped to transform our day-to-day lives and ability to support our transformational work.

One generous Souper bought us a brand-new laptop! This has been a massive asset, and means we can now be much more efficient. This is our favourite thing for skype meetings, now that we could replace the laptop that would screech if you moved the mouse pad whilst on skype.

Someone else gave us five used laptops that they no longer had use for. This has transformed our office, meaning there are now enough laptops per member of staff and we can work without any blue screens of death.

The great news is that the screeching laptop and other obsolete things went on to another charity. Jamies reuse and refurbish what they can and use them for training and volunteering opportunities for socially excluded adults.

And people also donated monitors! Combining these with the laptops means we now can have multi-screen set ups, working more efficiently than ever. This was incredibly generous and so helpful. Now we don’t hurt our eyes when we plan our sessions.

Ruby was also at BrightonSoup that night, supporting her mum whose project won the pot of money that night. Ruby decided to come volunteer for us, and has become an invaluable part of the team. She’s done everything from running our social media, fundraising, web design and more. Thank you to Ruby for coming to volunteer with us in the office.

In addition, when Matt and the team at Natural Balance asked the organisers of BrightonSoup about some projects he could fundraise for, Matt and his team chose to fundraise for us! Running 10 miles they raised over £1,000 for our dementia work: enough for four sessions. Thank you to Matt, Mark, James, Davide, Lisa, Seth, Nathalie, Natasha, Peter and Emily for running for us, and thank you to Soup organiser Will for putting Matt in touch with us.

From Matt’s fundraising, his friend Marcia has chosen to fundraise at her staged reading of Miss Everdene, based on Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd at Hove Methodist Church at 7:30pm on the 25th of November. How much will this fundraise? We don’t know, but we know it’s money that without heading to Soup we wouldn’t have had before.

We’ve been humbled by seeing in action what can happen when a community comes together – they can do incredible things. An evening of soup and chatter led to us being faster, quicker, and better staffed because people reached out to us. This means we can help more people, and make a bigger difference in our community.

So, thank you to all Soupers and those who reached out to us. Next time you can’t vote for someone, know that maybe you have helped in another way just by being a part of the community.”

Lucy Stone
Strategic Director
Rhythmix

28th October 2016