North America

A year ago, I received a phone call asking me if El Sistema USA® wanted to partner with a commercial mission to space called Polaris Dawn. I was as surprised to get this call as you probably are to hear about it. My first thought was: Why El Sistema USA?

The Aaron Copland Fund for Music is accepting applications to fund professional performances of contemporary American concert and jazz music.

With a sharp rise in families migrating to an increasingly expensive New York City, many children in the city are living in homeless shelters.

As The Lewis Prize enters a new phase, we are taking the learnings from our grant process, field relationships, and research to create a platform for expanded investment in creative youth development. We’ve designed the Creating Abundance Collaborative, a cross-sector space where practitioners, young people, researchers, philanthropists, and policymakers come together to advance the field through shared learning and pooled resources.

A new music curriculum resource will soon be on its way to orchestral programs across North America.

In mainstream media, youth voices are widely absent, overlooked, or sensationalized. Youth on Record (YOR) aims to address this gap through our creative youth programming, including its Podcasting Production Internship. The program seeks to foster a supportive environment where young people explore creative storytelling and produce podcasts that amplify their voices and ideas.

With fewer than 15 fluent Lingít speakers left in the world, there is an urgent initiative to revitalize and sustain this language of the native Alaskan people in this area. In 2021, JAMM began to partner with elders in the Lingít community, and also with a number of organizations—Sealaska Corporation, Sealaska Heritage Institute, Goldbelt Heritage Foundation, Douglas Indian Association, Juneau Arts and Humanities Council, and the University of Alaska Southeast—with the goal of integrating Lingít language, values, and culture into its established violin program.

El Sistema Toronto students teamed up with award-winning Indigenous hip hop artist Cody Coyote and Juno-nominated Toronto rapper Saukrates to write and record “WAY: We Are Young,” a song that captures both the hopefulness and vulnerability of young people who are coming of age in a rapidly changing world.

To complement the “Ambassador (Re)Introductions” published in April, the cohort recorded video introductions for the month of June. Listen to the Ambassadors as they say hello in their native languages, from every corner of the globe.

Researchers from WolfBrown spent six years studying Carnegie Hall’s NYO2 orchestra, a free orchestral program engaging musicians from historically underrepresented communities in classical music. Their resulting report, “With Freedom of Soul to Do and Be: A Longitudinal Study of Young Musicians in Carnegie Hall’s NYO2 Orchestra,” offers an insider’s look into what makes a youth orchestra truly inclusive.