Independent Venue Community (IVC) is a social prescribing music charity offering a program of education, development and community activity into music venues during the day, throughout the year, around the country.

It is the sister charity of  Independent Venue Week which was launched in 2013. Since launching IVW, we’ve seen up close, some of our venue community who have built meaningful connections with local community groups. Inspired by these relationships, we recognised that more venues could play a far deeper role beyond live music at night. These spaces are part of the fabric of the community, providing an access point for culture and self-expression. They are welcoming places for people of all characteristics and from all walks of life.

Yet, they are often closed during the day whilst so many community groups are looking for spaces to come together and connect in person. We felt there was an opportunity to bring everything together, showcasing localised activity to our national venue network.

Since 2015, we have been creating, growing and delivering activity in partnership with various community groups as well as leading music industry organisations and charities that do good work in local areas across the UK. Our goal is to help connect communities at a local level on a national scale.

You can see more about our work over the years here;

We live by two mantra’s here;

If You Can See It, You Can Be It – We want people to be able to see themselves on stage and working behind the scenes, irrespective of their personal characteristics or where they live.

and

Nothing About Us Without Us – We want to continue to develop our programmes WITH the communities they are being delivered for, not tell them what we think they need.

A strong focus of our work is about creating opportunities for people to build careers in the music and creative industries. We know there is talent in every village, town as well as city but there are too many people that are pushed aside or seen as difficult. So often, they are talented but bored or ignored.

A career in the music industry is a great opportunity to unlock that talent to enable those people to channel their energy and passion into a thriving career and we will match them with the right guidance and support. With the ongoing demise of youth clubs and community centres, using venues during the day when they are so often closed until a 4pm load in, make so much sense.

We believe it’s on IVC as the industry, to go out and find this talent, nurture, train and develop these people to create a representative music industry of the future.

We ran as a Community Interest Company from Nov 16 and became a charity in July 24