Samaritans Stress Down Day

Catalyst gave support to the Samaritans at their second national awareness day entitled Stress Down Day. Catalyst was asked if they would like to make a contribution by providing a fun, group activity, which would involve a fairly large number of people with the ethos of the day in mind.

Orchestrate! was the perfect solution and so we donated our time for managing the event, and paid for the musicians. The Samaritans took control of raising awareness and recruiting participants (each paying £25 that went straight to the Samaritans) plus more was collected on the day.

The whole day was a roaring success and the total amount raised was £2000

"I'd like to say thank you so much for providing us with the opportunity to 'Instrumentalise' as part of our Stress Down Day national awareness campaign. It was the most fun I've had in ages and I think that the concept is a stroke of genius. I felt a huge sense of achievement by the end of the performance and can see how effective this would be in helping build stronger teams. Steve had just the right balance between the discipline needed to get 130 people organised and playing together with the element of fun involved. He was an excellent and motivating conductor. I thought the tutors deserved medals for welding groups of complete novices into basic musicians and all done without any tears! It was very impressive".