The Music and Parental Wellbeing Alliance aims to enable, sustain, and expand an international and interdisciplinary community that works towards ensuring that all parents have the opportunity – and are empowered and equipped – to engage with music that can support their wellbeing.
Our Alliance grew from the AHRC-funded Music and Parental Wellbeing Research Network (2023-25), which collaboratively addressed three key questions: What musical practices could be used to support parents in a wide range of contexts? How can music practitioners working in this area be supported and cared for? How can music be implemented as a sustainable part of parental wellbeing practices and policies? The complexity of these questions and who they involve necessitated the need for a collaborative approach, and our Network brought together over 270 people, from around the globe, working at the intersection of music and parental wellbeing to think across and between disciplinary and conceptual boundaries.
Through our collaborative work, we set the mission for our new Alliance:
SHAPE mission – the Music and Parental Wellbeing Alliance aims to share research resources, convene knowledge exchange opportunities, develop shared understandings of what counts as robust evidence through interdisciplinary methods, and seek and advocate for funding for the field.
SUPPORT mission – the Music and Parental Wellbeing Alliance aims to establish and facilitate a community of practice, work towards offering carefully-tailored training and capacity building opportunities for professionals, advance understanding of what constitutes high quality practice in the field, and share practice resources.
SHARE mission – the Music and Parental Wellbeing Alliance aims to advocate where appropriate for the power of music in supporting parental wellbeing, develop guidelines for parents and those who work with parents, proactively build relationships with pivotal policy makers and influencers nationally and internationally, synthesize key findings to increase the impact of research, and involve parents and practitioners as crucial drivers in all this work.
Our vision and mission is set out in our freely-available position paper in Music & Science. The Alliance is co-founded and co-chaired by Professor Rosie Perkins (Royal College of Music, London) and Dr Katie Rose Sanfilippo (City St George’s, University of London).
Please register for free membership below.