The Education and Community Unit of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra seeks to provide access to creative music-making projects for a broad spectrum of the community, including school pupils, the elderly, people with special needs, prison inmates, students, hospital patients, amateur musicians and young people. The range of projects can include:

repertoire and composition based projects; workshops linked to the national curricula for music, literacy and numeracy; cross artform projects combining music, dance, drama, photography and ceramics; and large-scale performance projects where amateur musicians of all ages can play alongside members of the BSO.

There are similar projects with players from youth orchestras in Dorset and Hampshire, and workshop performances of orchestral works by local composers. Special needs projects are a speciality, often using the Soundbeams instruments to facilitate the music-making.