Creating Education Opportunities through the Arts

Educational disparities are entrenched throughout society, stemming from numerous root factors. In communities where Playing For Change Foundation (PFCF) operates, racial and gender inequality, aggregated by poverty, are clear factors blocking educational opportunities for all community members. These often manifest in a lack of space and educational resources necessary to re-engage learners who already face negatively disproportionate educational effects of COVID-19. In rural Nepal, caste and gender status for centuries has defined who receives education and who does not. In rural Morocco, ethnic status is directly correlated to high-school drop out rates. In predominately Black townships of Cape Town, redlining has resulted in poor educational quality. 

Across 14 countries where PFCF has created music and community centers, more than 3,000 youth we reach face such educational disparities. In 40 of 50 program locations, we operate the only music education and cultural activities free of charge available within the local community, and 20 of which also offer other educational opportunities within academic subjects or other extracurricular activities like sports and technology programs. Thousands more we do not yet reach within these communities have no outlet for quality educational experiences, positive social-emotional development, or inter-generational dialogues to map their own futures. 

PFCF’s model and methodology foremost relies on establishing and sustaining leadership presences in communities otherwise ignored within their own national or regional contexts. In rural Nepal, we established the first educational institution where music is a compulsory subject in the curriculum, and where caste or gender status has not relation to admission. We started with 17 students in 2014 and now we have more than 300 students from the rural villages of Tintale and even more remote surrounding villages, and are now expanding to create the first secondary school in the village. In the rural desert town of M’hamid El Ghizlane in southeastern Morocco, we have established the first community center where music, culture, educational, and environmental activities now reach 300 community members and youth, celebrating the ethnic and cultural diversity of the region. Newly created designs for a state-of-the-art music school, the first in the entire region of Zagora, recently were awarded the Global Prize from the prestigious Holcim Foundation Awards for Sustainable Construction, and has just been fully funded through grants from several INGOs. In the townships of Gugulethu and Phillippe outside of Cape Town, our after school music programs across 10 schools in the area reach 300 children, and offer free nutritional programs to more than 120 youth who face food insecurity at home. Children cannot learn if they are hungry. 

In these ways, our solution is to empower local leaders to respond to local needs by providing them with the resources they identify. Whether it is text books, physical infrastructure, food, or music instruments, we establish community spaces where these resources are made available, and we build coalitions of local, regional, and international actors who are ready to change local narratives and redefine what is possible. Music is our entry point, leading to community engagement and true community change. 

PFCF creates such programs in communities of low economic status but of great cultural wealth. For example, our newest programs in the Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement in northern Uganda and on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota respectively engage South Sudanese refugee children who fled civil war and Native American youth from the poorest community within the United States. In Uganda, we are working with Swiss INGO to.org to construct a cultural center that is sure to become a primary community space to house educational programs and gender-based-violence awareness programs. We have already begun to engage local schools to partner and pool resources, and are in the pilot stage a Protection of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse program. Establishing this type of space and community programming will provide refugee youth a new foundation, new resources, and new role models where they can work towards defining their own futures, a stark change from only recently having their immediate future defined for them by war and conflict. In South Dakota, we are working with the NGO First Peoples’ Fund, who has recently established the Oglala Arts Space, the first community space for cultural programming offered free of charge on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Music programming, spoken word, and cultural preservation activities are offered to youth who face severe under education, and who are surrounded by community issues like alcoholism and high suicide rates. Creating spaces where they can develop positive social-emotional skills and where they can be engaged by cultural actors who will act as mentors and role models will reshape how they view their community and the types of possibilities they can reach in their futures. 

I truly believe music is our universal language and the best way we can level the playing field for youth in need around the globe. We all speak it. We all need it in our lives whether we realize it or not. As many studies tell you, there is not greater way to close academic gaps than through music education. Since I came on as Executive Director of PFCF in 2018, we have expanded from 11 countries into 14, operating in 20 more locations than before I started. We have partnered with the UNFPA to create a new program in Costa Rica, and have groups ranging from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to local municipalities to fund our projects sustainably. 

I am surrounded by local staffs in each location who are from the communities where we operate. Program development, design, and execution is driven by local community members. Our growth has been sustained because of the strength of our local teams, all of which are musicians or cultural actors who are now local or even regional leaders on grassroots development. In Nepal, we started with a handful of musicians to lead music classes, and now we have just established the PFCF’s first national NGO, Playing For Change Nepal, who has a team of more than 40 leaders, staff, and teachers. In Morocco, three volunteers quickly became 10 full time staff members and more than 100 musicians on roster who teach classes rooted in the local culture. Such examples abound from community to community. 

Growth since I joined PFCF in 2018 has positioned our organization and our local teams to go to the next level. We have gone from responding to immediate needs to laying our roadmaps for transformational change across diverse contexts internationally. Community members in the time period have gone from expressing that they feel forgotten by their state to becoming local leaders in community and regional meetings defining what support that state can provide. This has resulted in roads, in new buildings, in English teachers, in technology classes, in International collaborations, in gender and racial equality. Now is the time for us to work with MIT Solve and realize the change that has been sought after since PFCF was established in 2007. 

Outside of funding Solve can connect me and many of our local program leaders to markets, conferences, donors where if they have the opportunity to express the change they have created within their communities, I know they engage national and international supporters and grow their own coalitions to become self-sustaining entities and models for education and sustainable development in their countries and around he world. 

In rural Nepal, caste systems and discriminations among ethnicities has been a major issue for centuries. Using music and the arts, we have been able to address this systematic problem and open up social-emotional opportunities within classrooms in Tintale village so that now at our Tintale Educational Academy, all ethnic groups are learning and sharing the same spaces together. We are raising young generations to learn in an environment where racial equity is normalizes; we are engaging elders in the community to see through their children and grand children that all are equal. We use this approach in every country where we operate to address root and systematic discrimination and promote peace through music, opening up equal educational opportunities to all. 

1) Continue to establish and sustain cultural centers and music schools that engage youth in marginalized communities. In 2022, we operate 17 music programs across 50 locations across 14 countries. Moving towards 2027, we have identified five new locations to create, projecting to reach upwards of 10,000 youth per year through regular programming across all programs.  Traveling to locations to establish relationships with local community leaders, educational centers, cultural actors to learn the community needs and so as to position ourselves appropriately to respond to these needs is how we will accomplish this goal. 2) Further investment in local leadership and continued economic opportunities for local cultural actors. In 2022, we provide income to more than 150 local collaborators to lead programming. By 2027, we envision hiring hundreds of more musicians to lead classes, workshops, and take part in creating positive change. 3) Combat Systemic Discrimination. Our weekly activities use music as a tool for education and social change. We provide platforms for minority communities unduly marginalized to engage local youth through the power of music to celebrate identities and break down barriers. 4) Develop digital skill sets among youth and adult program participants. In 2022, we’ve engaged program leaders across all locations, created digital pilot programs, and developed a digital learning portal to pivot towards sustained digital approaches.

We use Google Suite to create collaborative administrative spaces across all program locations to keep updated information on students information, teachers information, monthly budgets, schedules, material and resource needs, and inventories. Through these workspaces we are able to monitor on a monthly basis our student reach, how many teachers we are employing, hours of instruction per teacher and per student, female to male employee ratio. Beyond these data, we implement bi-annual surveys and testimonials from every program to get a narrative sense as to how our programming is impact students' lives as well as the wider community. In June, we interviewed students in rural Morocco about how they perceived music studio opportunities so as to create their own music and define their own narratives. One guitar student, Anas, said that such opportunities are "impossible" - music studios do not exist in the region; one needs to travel 15 hours to Casablanca to record, which includes transportation, accommodations, and studio costs make this concept not possible. Within a few months, we established a partnership with Studio Hiba in Casablanca, the biggest studio in Africa, who has since come to train on music production at the program location in rural Morocco, purchasing music studio equipment. Now, not only are recording options possible, but they are an aspect of regular programming, allowing marginalized youth to tell their own stories through music. 

To increase equal educational, social, and economic opportunities among marginalized youth and community members internationally, Playing For Change Foundation establishes community music and culture programs that allow youth around the world to rise up through their own cultures. 

We identify community leaders and cultural actors and empower them with the resources and support systems they need to address systemic educational, social, racial, gender, and economic discriminations faced by community members. 

We create coalitions of community leaders, local NGOs, national organizations, and INGOs so as to diversify not only sources of funding to accomplish change, but also the voices who are defining this change. 

We build new community spaces where there are no other spaces available so that educational, cultural, and social opportunities can be opened up within local communities.  

Playing For Change Foundation is most effective when we are combining local, ancestral knowledge and cultural values with modern technology. We believe in the power of storytelling, most importantly empowering marginalized groups to be able to tell their own stories. We use numerous platforms to do this, such as: Soundtrap music production app, video production equipment, we lead online Zoom and Skype collaboration sessions, online trainings in English and other subjects, and music engineering lessons for our most inspired and creative talents. We bring all these together, and we bring all of our international staff together through Google Suite and Whatsapp, maximizing pre-established modes of communication to identify and respond to needs as soon as possible. 

Inclusion is a core aspect of Playing For Change Foundation. Our executive staff comprises 5 women and 3 men; our international staff represents a diverse group of historically marginalized and discriminated communities. This includes female leaders in Tijuana designing programming to get boys and girls out of gang-violence and into safe and nurturing spaces among the most dangerous local neighborhoods, Afro-Carribean leaders in Cahuita, Costa Rica creating new platforms to promote Afro culture in a predominately Hispanic environment, or the Mothers' Society in Tintale Village, Nepal who are creating wide network of women in the region to combat sex-trafficking.  

PFCF pools our funding from diverse sources to design and execute social and educational programming centered around music. We receive international grants such as from the U.S. Department of State, establish partnerships with groups like the UNFPA to create new locations, implement fundraising campaigns that bring in anywhere between $2 and $5,000 dollars from individual donors, and approach local municipalities where we work and raise tens of thousands of dollars locally. Diversifying funding sources also allows us to diversify how we co-design programming, engaging partners who specialize in gender violence or partners who specialize in academic support. We work with program leaders constantly throughout the year to define short, mid, and long term visions, ranging from big ideas to small details about to realize positive change in their communities. In 10 of the 14 countries where we work, we have established the only local NGO, and in Nepal we have established our first national NGO, Playing For Change Nepal to bring 6 program locations together to realize positive change through a united front. 

We have made concerted efforts since 2018 to finance our programs using local resources. Creating more opportunities for local funding is our top priority