Community Building

“Your alumni will become your best assets for your mission.” That’s what social entrepreneurs from Changemaker Fellowships told AIM’s leadership when we began in 2018. So far, we agree. 

Seenaryo has been creating collaborative and imaginative community theater in Lebanon since 2015. We started working in Jordan in 2018, and we ran our first training in Palestine in 2022. While Seenaryo is first and foremost a theater organization, music has always played a big part in what we do.

There are not many music programs in the world with the word “Mystics” in their name. But it serves us well. Like many Ensemble readers, we are a passionate group of musicians working toward creating social inclusion and happy childhoods through music. And we find inspiration in the all-inclusive and peaceful messages of mystic poets like Kabir Das and Mahatma Gandhi.

Are you a music teacher looking to diversify your lesson plans? The Smithsonian Folkways website hosts a digital database of free music lesson plans from around the world.

It was during a choir rehearsal, at age nine, that I decided to become a composer. Choir was an oasis of joy in an otherwise difficult school experience; I simply lived for each opportunity to sing. Since then, it’s been my joy to witness, time and time again, music’s transformative power in community—never more so than in communities of singers, and never more powerfully than when those singers are empowered to compose their own songs.

Across the U.K., choirs are coming together to raise their voices for change.

The B-Me project has produced a collection of lovely new orchestral scores, which you can now explore and borrow for free.

A new research project in Scotland is taking its cue from young people.

It was not a promising time to be learning or teaching music in Lebanon. The Lebanese pound had depreciated by over 90%, making music lessons a luxury that few could afford. The National Conservatory of Music was mostly non-operational; schools had stopped music classes for lack of funding, and our country’s youth had no means to advance their musical education. In this challenging environment, Father Maatouk turned to the El Sistema model.

Can bringing young people from different cultures together, through arts-related experiences, help to promote understanding, communication, and peace building?

This is a question on the minds of many people working in the global field of arts for social change. Over the past few years, my program, The House of Good Tones in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, has partnered with two other Balkan programs (SO-DO, in Zagreb, Croatia, and the Music Art Project, in Belgrade, Serbia) on a research project designed to explore this question—a particularly important question in our part of the world.