Inside Sony Music
- Latest Round of Funding from Sony Music UK Social Justice Fund Focuses On Mental Health and Racism
- Oct 12, 2021
Today, Sony Music UK announced three new beneficiaries in their latest round of funding from the Global Social Justice Fund. This follows the June 2021 announcement that highlighted key partnerships chosen by a diverse advisory board that represents labels and divisions across Sony Music UK.
So, who are the organizations and what will the new partnerships focus on?
Mind
Mind provides advice and support to empower anyone experiencing a mental health problem, and it campaigns to improve services, raise awareness and promote understanding.
Building on Sony Music UK’s existing relationship, this innovative partnership aims to research mental health interventions for young people affected by racism. This is sometimes described as racial trauma, but research on the impact of racial trauma is limited to the UK.
Sony Music UK’s funding will enable this important youth-led project to understand the best blueprint for services, given statistics show that people from racialized groups may be more likely to experience mental health problems but less likely to receive appropriate support.
Mind submitted the proposal as part of their aim to be an unflinching advocate for racial justice and mental health and as part of their ambition to become an anti-racist organization. Read more about the project here.
The Runnymede Trust
As the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank, The Runnymade Trust generates intelligence to challenge race inequality in Britain through research, network building, leading debate, and policy engagement.
Contributions from the Sony Music UK Social Justice Fund will finance ground-breaking research with Runnymede: Examining a lack of ethnic diversity across some music genres and exploring structural barriers that may prevent Black, Brown or ethnically diverse artists from starting or succeeding within genres where such artists are less represented.
The findings will inform efforts to dismantle barriers and drive understanding within the music industry to enact long-term change.
OnSide
A UK-based national charity, OnSide is a national charity determined to make sure that all young people have the opportunity to shine by funding, building, launching and supporting a network of state-of-the-art, multimillion-pound Youth Zones in the UK’s most disadvantaged areas.
Three of those Youth Zones, specifically in London (Croydon, Barnet and Barking & Dagenham), will be supported through music mentoring programs for marginalized young people living in some of the capital’s most deprived and under invested communities, where young people can develop confidence-boosting skills in musicianship and beyond.
We are proud to develop our Global Social Justice Fund approach from a strong base of grassroots projects into addressing more embedded and structural challenges that we face as a society. You can read more about the Sony Music Group Global Social Justice Fund here.
Related:
Seven New Beneficiaries Announced for Sony Music UK’s Social Justice Fund
A Conversation With Towalame Austin, Sony Music Group’s Executive Vice President of Philanthropy and Social Impact
