'Truly inspiring and thrilling... an amazing achievement.' - George Monbiot
'Every performance, every moment was perfect. The most uplifting and life-enhancing finale I’ve ever witnessed.' - Chrissy Kinsella, Chief Executive, Mayor's Music Fund
Common and Kind 2019 is a series of partnership workshops between schools and groups from a diverse range of backgrounds across London, culminating in an extraordinary collaborative concert at the Union Chapel. Common and Kind concerts unite an exceptional range of world-leading solo artists from across the musical spectrum with a massed choir which brings together children and adults from a huge range of backgrounds in a unique collaboration.
Schools participating in 2019 are Duke's Academy (Haringey), Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School (Islington), Convent of Jesus and Mary Language College, St Gregory's College & ARK Academy Elvin (Brent), St Aubyn's School (Essex), Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy (Hackney) and St Paul's Way Trust School (Tower Hamlets). The schools are all participate in two partnership workshops, where they learn three songs together, make new connections and learn about the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, to whom a musical tribute will be paid in the combined choir feature in the first half of the concert. In these workshops, the children also explore language, and how it can be used to divide or to connect, in music as in wider society.
The schools join with an adult partnership choir, bringing together the London International Gospel Choir and the London Humanist Choir with the Islington Centre for Refugees and Migrants and Rainbows Across Borders (LGBT asylum seekers based in Croydon). All together, they create a choir of four hundred people.
The concert also features an exceptional line-up of solo artists and acts from across the musical spectrum. Common and Kind concerts since 2016 have included Dame Sarah Connolly, J. Hoard, Cassidy Janson, Mark Lettieri and Justin Stanton (Snarky Puppy), UK hip-hop legend Ty, the UK’s 2018 Eurovision entry SuRie, percussion virtuoso Bernhard Schimpelsberger, Thomas Gould, Ahmed Mukhtar, Sarah Jane Morris, ENO Harewood Artist soprano Nadine Benjamin Bengali pop star Saida Tani and author and activist George Monbiot with Ewan McLennan. 2019 will feature a similarly stunning array of artists.
As an organisation, founded entirely out of people power in 2016, we are merely a voluntary group, with nobody currently being paid to deliver exceptional, life-enhancing experiences for thousands of people since our foundation. We are actively exploring long-term funding prospects and charitable formation, and in 2018 were delighted to receive our first grant (of £2000) from the Postcode Community Trust. With the support of the Trust and crowdfunding, we have managed to cover costs over the past two years, while still relying on a substantial quantity of voluntary work (including all the administration and workshop leading). We are actively exploring funds for 2019 and for 2020 at this stage, but with no core funding in place, reaching this Crowdfunder target would guarantee that we can cover the basic concert costs, and expenses for all the refugees, asylum seekers and musicians. If we exceed our target, we would pay our amazing team of workshop leaders, who have delivered dozens of brilliant workshops in 2017 and 2018.
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