Hi everyone,
I do hope that you and yours are keeping well and sane in these extraordinary times we find ourselves in.
We have cancelled all face to face dance activity until further notice. In the meantime we will be offering online dance sessions starting on Monday 23rd March and ask you all to bear with us whilst we test out the best ways to do this. Here is the first session:
We have an initial plan in place now and intend to roll out sessions on the same days and times as we would have held these in our community settings.
Please see our news item here for the details to date: https://dancesyndrome.co.uk/online-dance-sessions/
We are living our values and doing everything we can to stay positive, connected and resilient. We intend to offer our online sessions free of charge and are asking for donations from all our supporters. I am also contacting our funders past and present to ask for additional funding support for salaries and freelance staff.
In the coming weeks we will be forming detailed planning in readiness for when we are able to relaunch our community dance work. In the meantime we ask that you all support this amazing charity by sharing our social media and linking us to people and organisations who can help us gain donations and/or funding during in this crisis. And of course sharing our good practice as a dedicated team who refuse to be beaten down.
From the ashes of disaster come the roses of success! (It’s a line from a song, there may be a prize if you can guess it).
If you’re not already doing so, please follow DanceSyndrome on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Linked In and Twitter. If you have more time on your hands right now then let’s really push to get a movement going on our social channels. We’re using the hashtags #carryondancing #showusyourmoves #righttodance and linking to the trending hashtags, for example #wereinthistogether
We will start our online dance sessions using You Tube as the platform and evaluate how this goes. If we get an increased following there may be opportunities to get advertisers’ interested. We’ve also contacted all the media and are asking them to feature us, we’ll keep doing this and evaluate where we are in a month’s time.
We are also asking our Dance Leaders and participants to film themselves dancing at home and share on our channels. All of our dancing family who are known to us personally are self isolating and we are setting up systems to buddy remotely to keep everyone connected.
I will keep you all informed of our progress. Please do send me your thoughts, ideas, contacts, anything and everything that could help us and we will action these wherever possible – dawn@dancesyndrome.co.uk
Thank you so much for getting behind the work of some incredible people, all brought together by Jen Blackwell’s dream. We need to keep her dream alive.
All very best wishes,
Dawn Vickers, Managing Director – DanceSyndrome
