Members of the ESPA College South Hill DofE group, Sunderland, have been involved in an exciting project for their Volunteering section. The group is made up of young people with autism who have been doing their DofE programmes through the college.
In December last year, members of the DofE group decided to collect items to send British service personnel around the world. At the same as this mini project was taking place another group of DofE participants were planning the annual college Christmas Carol Service. Traditionally the group perform a musical piece in front of friends, families and colleagues at Sunderland Minster. They were looking for inspiration for their performance and decided to continue the theme of the Armed Forces.
The idea quickly grew into writing an original song to raise awareness amongst their student group of the sacrifices and hardships endured by soldiers at Christmas. The performance was a great success and the group decided to expand the project to a wider audience and Autism4Heroes was born!
The song has since been rewritten for a year round appeal rather than just Christmas. They have now recorded the song at a professional studio, as used by McFly and Joe McElderry amongst others. The students experienced the rock n roll lifestyle for a couple of days as the tracks were recorded and learned about basic techniques involved in music production.
They have set up a Facebook group to publicise the project and keep people up to date with events. They hope to be able to sell copies of the song, called Help Our Heroes, to raise money for the official Help For Heroes charity, whilst using their activities to count towards their DofE programmes.