Support for Innovative Youth Music Programs
During a recent Amp Up NYC teacher-training workshop, teachers and Amp Up staff members paused for a photo with their instruments.
Hans Tanner
Building upon the momentum of the Soundbreaking campaign, Berklee continues to actively pursue funding opportunities with local and national corporations and foundations. This past fall, the college was invited to submit two proposals to the ELMA Music Foundation, whose mission is to provide philanthropic assistance to organizations in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States that either provide music education to underprivileged children and youth or provide assistance to members of the music community who are struggling with personal and financial hardship. Earlier this year, Berklee received word that both requests submitted to the foundation were approved for funding.
The first grant will contribute to scholarship support for students participating in youth development organizations currently or previously funded by the ELMA Music Foundation to pursue a bachelor’s degree at Berklee. Many of these sites are part of the Music and Youth Development Alliance (MYDA), a network of multi-service after-school youth centers that use music programming to engage young people in their own development. As part of this agreement, students from the Harlem Children’s Zone, Mama Foundation for the Arts Inc., Neutral Zone, Youth UpRising, RYSE Inc., A Place Called Home, and the Door – A Center of Alternatives, who are accepted to Berklee, will now be eligible to apply for scholarship support. These competitive grants will be awarded on the basis of academic merit, artistic talent, and financial need, and they will consider recommendations from sending organizations’ directors. Through the partnership with the ELMA Music Foundation and this generous investment in scholarship support, Berklee will have greater capacity to attract and retain deserving students by reducing financial barriers to higher education and rewarding exceptional talent.
The second grant from the ELMA Music Foundation will contribute to the costs of Amp Up NYC, a first-in-field joint venture uniting Berklee, Little Kids Rock, and the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) in an effort to expand and revitalize modern music education for children. The partnership is based on the shared belief that contemporary popular music is a cultural asset that is underused in classroom learning. Launched in early 2014, the initiative will roll out over a three-year period to serve an estimated 600 city schools and 60,000 K–12 public-school students. The program provides comprehensive teacher training, classroom instruction, state-of-the-art online technology, and thousands of new musical instruments, all at no cost to students, teachers, schools, or the school district. This is the first time public schools have integrated arts curriculum based on the music kids experience in their daily lives (rock, pop, hip-hop, etc.) and modern instrumentation (keyboards, guitars, drums, etc.) in traditional music education and it’s working. The project is on track and already reaching more than 26,000 students in New York City.
With this generous investment from the ELMA Music Foundation, Amp Up NYC will continue to expand to reach its full program potential over the next two years. Over the course of the full initiative, as many as 12 new teacher training workshops will educate more than 600 NYCDOE certified music teachers. Alongside the workshops, Amp Up NYC will present more than 20 professional development seminars to give teachers the requisite skill set for launching a modernized music program at their own schools. The ultimate goal is to make modern music education available to every student in New York City and create a student-centered paradigm in public school music education that can be scaled and replicated in other school districts across the nation. With support from the ELMA Music Foundation, the next two years will see an unprecedented effort to carry out this vision and strengthen the movement to expand music education in the United States.
Berklee is grateful for these two generous investments and excited to establish a productive and enduring partnership with the ELMA Music Foundation. For more information about ELMA, please visit: www.elmaphilanthropies.org. For more information about donating to Berklee or Amp Up NYC, please visit: berklee.edu/soundbreaking/giving.
Emma Stapleton is Berklee’s director of corporate foundations relations.
