A New Chapter
Lots has changed in the last month in all things CMFW and me! The 19th of April marked my two year anniversary of working as a music therapist and working at the Highfield Academies. I know the next two years will prove to be a period of growth and being chaotically busy as all these changes start to come to fruition.
First of all I would like to talk about the amazing opportunity I had to host and mentor a music therapy trainee from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) for their first placement. I trained at ARU myself and so it an experience to be on the other side of things, completing reports for students and liaising with the lecturers who taught me all my foundations of my practice.
The student I hosted was brilliant start to finish and showed such compassion and kindness towards the students. Her insight grew and I saw her confidence grow throughout the four months she was at the school.
It was a pleasure to watch her flourish and support her as she took on clients of her own. This process also developed my own skills in mentoring, managing people and sharing my knowledge, communicating better. It also served as a reminder of what it is to be learning new things all the time and that I should be taking more time to revise and develop my therapeutic skills.
I’m grateful for the experience and I hope to host more students in the future!
In other news, my career pathway is changing a bit. For the last two years I have solely been employed and it has been a wonderful experience! But over the last 6 months I have felt a need for change and variety in my life and work. So I made the decision to reduce my contracted hours at the schools to three days a week. From there, I decided that the two days I had free I would work as a freelancer and build my organisation Cambridgeshire Music For Wellbeing (CMFW), which I’m hoping you’ve all heard of by now, most likely from me banging on about it!
So from June onwards I will be working 3 days for Highfield still, but the rest of the week I will be all over the place! I already have some work in place with The Cambridge Acorn Project in East Cambridgeshire, a dementia choir and music therapy sessions in a care home, and the community choir (Meret) all booked in. Hopefully with a bit more hard work, by June I’ll have a few more jobs on the books. I’m so excited to start this new chapter and grow my skills in business management as well as my passion for helping people through music.
A final note- Meret The Community Choir is due to start THIS WEEK (25th April). So if you fancy a sing-a-long to some great tunes, please do join us all down at The Octagon Room, Bar Hill, Cambridge. From 7:45-9:15pm every thursday during term time! I would love to meet you and share my joy for music with you all!
Lots of love,
Rach and CMFW
Queenie (music therapy trainee) and I on her last day at Highfield Ely Academy 19/4/24
