Celi Barberia: 'Creating cultural connections through singing'

March 2020 marked the end of the British Council’s World Voice project. In November 2021, the Sing Up Foundation announced that it would be taking on the programme to build on its seven-year international legacy. I met up with Celi Barberia, the foundation's head, over Zoom to find out more about her plans for the project's future.

What benefits does the Sing Up programme offer its participants?

The original idea behind Sing Up when we developed our bid for funding in 2007 was to use singing as a tool for developing musicianship. However, we very quickly started hearing from schools and teachers about the improvement of social cohesion and pupils’ increased confidence. Hearing about these incredible transformations was a pivotal moment for us. It validated our belief that singing can really change young people's lives and bring school communities together.

I've sung my whole life and have always been amazed about the power of singing to bring people together. Singing is a real leveller - it’s free so anyone can do it, and every single person has a voice. In a group of kids, if there's a kid that maybe isn’t as strong of a singer, the fact that they're singing next to someone else actually helps them to develop their ear and pitch matching.

There's so much research about how singing can help improve learning and language development, but singing is also a mindful activity. When you're singing, you can't be worried about anything else because so much is going into breathing, listening, and thinking about the next verse or phrase. This can help kids to release the stresses of school and life and find a moment of peace.

The British Council’s World Voice project is now handing over the reins to the Sing Up Foundation - are you apprehensive at all about taking on a program that had already has an enormous legacy?

We had originally hoped to take the Sing Up programme worldwide and it was so inspiring for us to see how World Voice was able to take the benefits that we saw on a national scale with Sing Up and implement these worldwide.

It's a big task to take on and we are going to have to think about sustainability going forward, of course, but the great thing is that the people who were involved in World Voice are still super passionate about it. We’ve been consulting with people from 11 of the programme’s 23 countries over the last few months and they've told us they’re really encouraged by the things that they got to do during the time that World Voice was in their countries, and they want to continue with the project.

World Voice was designed as a training project with a cascade model. The aim was for people, once trained, to be able to continue teaching and growing the programme world voice so the project would create master trainers in each country who would then roll out the training to more and more teachers.

Our challenge now is to deliver something for the people who have worked with World Voice and who are still really interested in engaging with it, as well as attracting new countries to the model in a sustainable way.

It’s a beautiful thing to be able to take this forward and we have a lot to learn from World Voice and from the countries and people who've been involved in the programme.

What changes is the foundation planning to make to the programme for the future?

At the moment we're in the middle of our transition year and we’re really taking the time to consult with the countries and participants to make sure our plans going forward are sustainable. We want to find the right balance between something that is achievable and sustainable while still creating an impact.

World Voice’s work building childrens’ awareness of other cultures is obviously much needed in our current, quite divided world, does Sing Up plan to continue to build this particular part of initiative?

A huge part of the World Voice legacy is creating cultural connections through singing and that’s something we want to keep at the heart of the programme. World Voice projects were bespoke so the British Council team would work really closely with each country to build a project that was very grounded in that local space. A lot of the content on Sing Up includes songs from around the world, and it is so great for teachers to be able to use a song in a foreign language to kickstart learning about that country.

There were two projects that worked very closely with young refugees in Greece and Palestine which had a really huge impact. We’re now trying to develop a project inspired by these which will work with young unaccompanied minors in the UK, using singing as a vehicle to create cultural connections and help improve the wellbeing of those new arrivals. Unfortunately, there are so many young people that are in these positions all around the world and we hope that singing can bring them some respite.

Throughout the pandemic mental health has really suffered, do you feel that the Sing Up Foundation’s work is giving the next generation the tools to cope better with external factors, like pandemics, which might affect their mental health in the future?

There's some research around how singing can help develop emotion focused coping which is a method of acknowledging and dealing with emotions when they arise. Singing can help you deal with those emotions without feeling like you need to deny them.

One thing that has been interesting to see throughout the pandemic is that humans are really resilient. Although doing singing online isn't perfect, people have found ways of doing it that have impacted upon them, and this is a great reminder that there are tools that we have at our disposal that we can use to improve the situations we're in.

Sing Up foundation was started in 2017 and is now 5 years old – where do you hope to see the foundation in another five years?

We're really hoping to get a lot more projects on the ground. One of our goals is to use singing to help improve the current crisis in the mental health of young people in adolescence. While we have to acknowledge that there are some mental health needs that must be addressed by clinicians, we're determined to do research and run projects which create advice and guidance to help make a tangible difference to the wellbeing of young people.