Stockbridge Music Hub is a unique community music initiative, created in response to the isolation experienced during the Covid pandemic. What began as an opportunity for the neighbourhood to reconnect has grown into a highly valued and increasingly ambitious resource, bringing professional musicians, children, older people and community members together through music.

As a professional cellist and community music practitioner, I founded and developed the Hub to combine my professional musical life with a commitment to serving the community. I believe strongly that musicians have an important role beyond the concert platform. Music can create connection, improve wellbeing and provide opportunities for people of different ages, backgrounds and abilities to participate, listen and create together.

Based at Stockbridge Church, the Hub provides a welcoming home for performances, workshops and participatory music-making. Over the past five years, professional artists including Jacqui Dankworth, Hannah Rarity and Steven Osborne have performed at the Hub, alongside weekly activities such as Cello Choir, which is open to all ages and abilities. In collaboration with Hear My Music, the Hub also provides specialist music sessions for children on the autistic spectrum.

The Hub's work extends beyond its base. I have developed partnerships with Stockbridge Primary School, Braeburn House, Edinburgh Academy and Broughton Community School, bringing professional musicians and creative music-making into schools and care settings.

Monthly lunchtime concerts bring professional musicians from classical, jazz and traditional backgrounds to local audiences. In 2024, Jazz in Stockbridge was established to provide a platform for talented jazz musicians who had lost their regular home during the temporary closure of the Jazz Bar. These concerts have strengthened the Hub's role as a meeting place for both audiences and musicians.

The Hub is also developing new inclusive activities. Good Vibrations is a relaxed session for adults and their carers, combining playing, singing and creative music-making. Tutti is an ensemble for anyone who plays an instrument, regardless of age or ability, providing an opportunity to make and arrange music together.

The Hub has demonstrated that a community-based music organisation can combine artistic excellence with participation, inclusion and social connection. Thousands of people have engaged with the Hub since its creation, and participation continues to grow.

The initial five-year funding commitment that enabled the Hub to become established has now come to an end. We are therefore seeking support to secure the Hub's future for the next five years and to build on what has already been achieved.

Our ambition is to develop the Hub as a sustainable model of community music: a place where professional musicians can perform and create, where children and adults can participate regardless of ability or experience, where schools and care settings can access high-quality musical activity, and where the wider community can come together through shared musical experiences.

The Hub is not simply a concert venue or a programme of music classes. It is a connected community resource in which professional performance, participation, education and wellbeing reinforce one another. Our aim over the next five years is to strengthen these connections, reach more people and create opportunities for new partnerships and new work.

I believe this model has the potential to be replicated in other communities. The experience of establishing Stockbridge Music Hub demonstrates what can happen when professional musicians are given the opportunity to work consistently within their own community and when music is treated not simply as entertainment, but as a means of connection, creativity and shared experience.