Letter to VH members
Dear lovely Vox people
On Tuesday, Harvey outlined our plans for VH’s 10th Anniversary Year. They include Music on the Mind in November, another concert with Sir Ray Davies in February and a repeat of Freedom Song at the Hackney Empire in March. We will be singing with Lianne Carroll in May and later in the summer, we will perform Harvey’s Fairy Dream/Purcell and a new work by Clara. Finally, in November 2020, we will present a brand new oratorio based on an incredible book by Anthony Ray Hinton: The Sun Does Shine (read it!!).
This is an ambitious and exciting programme, celebrating some of our best work as well as tackling new pieces. We will be using other venues as well as St Luke’s and we also hope to make two recordings over this period.
Of course, it costs a lot of money to put on this sort of programme – more than we can raise through subs and ticket income alone. But we do have a fund-raising strategy. We have already received one small grant and we are confident others will follow. However, in order to record Music on the Mind, we need to generate an additional £8,000 by January 2020.
Because time is short, we have decided to do this via a form of ‘crowd-funding’ and we need your help! We are reviving our Just Giving page so that anyone can make a donation, enhanced of course by Gift Aid. But what we really need is 50 or more individuals, ‘angels’ who care about mental health, or who just love Vox Holloway, and who might be willing to sponsor this project by making a more substantial one-off donation of (say) £100 – 500. Last year some choir members offered extra help with Freedom Song, but in the end, funding from the Backstage Trust covered all our costs. This time we don’t have such generous support, so we are inviting anyone who feels in a position to do so, to make a substantial donation (ideally gift-aided) in order to help us cover the MotM recording costs.
We are writing to our patrons and other high-profile people with an interest in the issue of mental health to ask them to become a sponsor. And we would like you to think about your own connections – friends, colleagues etc – who might like to help. To make it easy, we have drafted a letter (below) which you could use/adapt in approaching people.
Do get in touch if you want more information, and please give us any ideas/suggestions that you think the committee should follow up on. We need to ‘bridge the gap’ in the next few weeks, so we are keen to move as quickly as possible on this.
We have a rare opportunity this November to record Music on the Mind. It is such a powerful, exquisitely beautiful and important work that we do not want to lose the chance to make it more widely available. It’s a challenge but I’m sure we can do it!
THANK YOU
From the VH Trustees
Vox Holloway 