Grey Lynn's Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre

There’s a big old house on the corner of Browning Street and Surrey Crescent that’s been a few different things over the last decade and right now it is the amazing Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre.

“Our primary objective is working with children right up to 21, when a special needs child is then deemed an adult. The youngest we started working with last year was 11 months old. We do some work with adults, about 10% of our clients, and then right at the end of that is a bit of work we’ve done with a dementia unit. That was group work, and will always be group work as the whole idea of it is social interaction. If you work with groups that are really isolated then you’ll try to use music therapy as a social tool and this will often be in groups.”

Children of all ages come to Raukatauri and most are paired up with a therapist for one on one sessions which become an integral part of their development, education and life for a long time. These sessions occur at the same time each week with the same therapist in the same room. This routine can be extremely important to some children, and can be instrumental in allowing a child to begin to form that bond with the therapist as they get used to the structure of their sessions.

Each room has a piano and a guitar but that is only the beginning as a cupboard opens up full to the brim with weird and wonderful instruments. “Pretty much anything that makes a sound will be used, including voice and feet. We have some children who communicate with their feet. Anything tactile is great, we will work with anything, and we have about 520 instruments at the centre.

“The three most common areas of children we work with are cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and then the fastest growing group is kids on the autism spectrum. We have quite a lot of children who will have multiple challenges, some with development delay that haven’t been diagnosed at all.”

Raukatauri works with these children and explores ways to overcome behavioral issues that may be impacting on life at school, at home and in relationship development. They are also working with children who struggle with physical movement or speech and the therapy actually focuses on creating new ways of moving, new ways of communicating and offers music as a way to create comfortable, safe and learning environments. The music is used as a way to create new pathways in the brain and in some cases re-forge and repair pathways after accidents. All through this they are maintaining a dialogue about the direction of the child and revisiting their goals, and the parents’ goals, every six months to see in what way music is assisting.

“We are operating six days a week now, to help work with families who have issues with transport and can’t get here during the week. Two, nearly three years ago we found a fantastic room at the Titirangi Community Centre and we hire that room for a day and a half now with a therapist making it feel like home.”

It was their first satellite centre and has been hugely successful leading to them launching one in Orewa and another in February in the centre of Otara at the Otara Music and Arts Centre. These spaces have to feel right, as if they were the home base in Grey Lynn. This allows families who may not be able to make it to Grey Lynn to create relationships with a therapist and become part of the Raukatauri family.

As the only centre in New Zealand, Raukatauri does a lot of reaching out into the community, getting involved with local schools and having relationships with many health bodies around Auckland. All of this helps to raise awareness of music therapy and what it is and can do. One of its goals is to get to high school students and make them realise that this is a career path for musicians, something extremely rewarding they can do on the side of being in a band or performing.

The positive effects of music therapy are often felt family wide. Parents are given a new lease on life as their child responds to a new way of doing things, and siblings have a new friend who can communicate more, physically play more or just interact and engage in new ways. (FINN MCLENNAN-ELLIOTT)

www.rmtc.org.nz