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The National Foundation for Youth Music (Youth Music) has earmarked £2m to help more young people gain access to musical instruments.

The Instrument Swap Scheme and Instrument Purchase Programme follow on from Youth Music?s Instrument Amnesty held last year in conjunction with the BBC, in which BBC viewers donated more than 6,500 instruments to young people wanting to learn to play. Youth Music will help community music organisations to purchase the instruments, and non-profit making ventures that took part in the Amnesty are invited to apply for Purchase Programme grants of up to £1,000 to buy new or second-hand instruments. Music Services across the country will now be able to mend broken instruments with a Youth Music Instrument Swap Scheme repair grant of up to £10,000. In return for funding the repairs, some of the fixed instruments must be donated to an online swap shop where Music Services may trade their surplus instruments for ones they need. The instruments will be exchanged on regional ?swapping days? to be held in May 2002. In a pilot earlier this year, £24,000 was given towards the repair of 245 instruments owned by Music Services in the North of England, including 160 cellos at Kirklees Music School. When repaired, the instruments had a collective value of £75,000.
Contact Kirsty Leith, t: 020 7902 1060, e: kirsty.leith@youthmusic.org.uk