Global Collaboration

While our daily lives are rattled by increasing global instability, polarization, and apathy, culture workers working toward youth empowerment and social change share many of the same questions. How do we empower young people without transferring unreasonable responsibility? How do we equip and motivate while acknowledging legitimate, sometimes harsh realities? How do we facilitate interconnectedness, in times of global dehumanization?

Climate change is a complex, often overwhelming issue, causing many to turn away or disengage from conversations about it. That’s where music comes in. Just as we share this planet, we share the language of music. And when we speak it, we have the power to restore our planet’s health and build a thriving network of changemakers.

Unlike more privileged settings, we could not make the switch to online teaching; we did try it, but most of our children did not have their own phones, and there were other issues, such as out of tune instruments, strings broken, and instruments outgrown. When the lockdown eventually lifted, many of our children had moved out of area or progressed to higher mainstream education which took them away from music lessons, either geographically or in terms of available time. We have had to start over, with new groups of children for violin and cello.

But there is also good news to balance things out.

With their decades of positive impact and wealth of institutional knowledge, it would have been easy for DWS to focus on maintaining their success. Instead, we at the Playing For Change Foundation were recently privileged to partner with DWS to bolster and expand their music program. The initial goals of our partnership were simple: identify and hire professional music educators who can help take the existing program to the next level, and maintain the standard of excellence that DWS has achieved in its other extracurricular programming.

Few would disagree that imagining and constructing something good for humanity, in a place where vast harm has been done, is a creative act. Therefore, the completion of The Ensemble House in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina can be seen as one of the world’s great creative triumphs in recent years.

What’s better than true international collaboration? Over 100 musicians, educators, and students from five countries—Ghana, Rwanda, Panama, Morocco, and the United States—have reimagined the Tears for Fears song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” with a new music video produced by non-profit Young Musicians Unite and the Playing for Change Foundation.