Packing a Punch It may be small but Sound Sense is proving an increasingly powerful voice for community music and musicians. Dominic Dwight profiles the advocacy body What does someone who runs a DJ workshop for inner city kids and someone who runs a singing group for OAPs have in common? The answer is twofold: firstly they're both community musicians, albeit working in very different mediums; secondly, they would both benefit by finding out more about what Sound Sense can do for them.

The national development agency for community music and musicians, Sound Sense was born out of a conference held at Manchester 's Abraham Moss Centre in April 1989, on the day of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster. Its inaugural meeting was held in December that year and the launch of its own magazine, Sounding Board, in March 1990 heralded its official arrival on the UK arts scene. Fourteen years on and Sound Sense is a truly influential voice. That it has gained such visibility while remaining true to its core constituents is due in no small part to director Kathryn Deane, although – being a committed participatory player – she'd never take personal credit.

Deane's early direction hardly hinted at a life in music or arts administration. With a first-class degree in applied physics from Durham , her professional path initially took in journalism and publishing. But an interest in community arts became a passion after she participated in a Royal Opera House community project.

She then involved herself in an Opera North outreach project in Mansfield (at the time of the pit closures), a new-opera project in Bury St Edmonds shopping centres and a music-theatre programme in Sunderland . In short, she'd found ‘what I want to do when I grow up!'.

Deane's life-enhancing experiences in community arts are particularly pertinent to her role at Sound Sense, of which she became director in 1995: ‘The stuff we're interested in at Sound Sense is what the music does, not what the music is. What the music does is support, help and encourage the end users. So those two musicians who are running DJ workshops and OAP singing groups would certainly find lots to talk about and would share lots of concerns.

‘They may well have different musical development needs but their professional development needs will be much the same: What's the procedure for dealing with people in my group? How do I carry out group work when I've got a range of abilities and aptitudes and interests and so on? How do I get work in the first place? How do I get insurance? Those are universal concerns for community musicians. It doesn't matter what field of music making or what client group they're working with, we can help with all of those.'

While Sound Sense started as a networking facility for community musicians, Deane now thinks of networking ‘as one job among many, although that is very important to us and to our members. Whenever we ask for feedback on the professional development days we hold the thing they always like best is the ability for networking.'

These professional development days, or gatherings, are a large part of Sound Sense's work, organising events nationwide for members and non-members alike. ‘The first thing to be said is that they are always in partnership,' says Deane. ‘We never walk alone. The event we had recently in Scotland was with a local music organisation called The Lemon Tree. We're holding some events in Essex in partnership with Essex County Council Arts and Education services. We'll be in Leeds in September looking at evaluation with Yorkshire Youth And Music. They're a mixture of debate, discussion, some direct training, usually some music making – community musicians can't get very far without having to make some music themselves.'

Gatherings are less about lecturing and more about group work, something that reflects the spirit of the community.
‘It's not about teaching; it's about facilitating. It's not about telling people what to do; it's about leading a group through what they want to do,' Deane insists. ‘It's about creative work, so we run the area gatherings in a very creative, participative style. In the jargon, they're peer learning opportunities.
‘We don't do an awful lot of sitting people in rows, getting them to listen to speeches from a platform. We do a lot of sitting around in circles, exploring for ourselves what issues mean and everybody has a part to play in those discussions.' The overall aim of these events, ‘depends on the gathering to a large extent', Deane points out. ‘There's always a wide spread of experiences, that's for sure. Some may be aimed at emerging practitioners and we may run relatively entry-level activities for them. On the other hand, we may run a gathering aimed at people who've been in the business for some time. They're not floor-level training sessions – they are professional development sessions, implying that you are a professional in some sense of the word.'

Despite the diversity of community music work (which can be both a strength and a weakness) the people working in the field face a number of common challenges and share a lot of the same goals.