José Ángel Salazar Marín

For the last eight years, I’ve coached violinists for the YOLA National Festival. Each summer, it is a remarkable thing to walk into the first sectional on the first day and witness an exceptional level of preparation from 18 violinists who, for the most part, don’t know each other and have never played together—a group of students that have made a commitment to each other before even meeting one another. This is what defines the YOLA National Festival: the dedication and integrity of all participants, a spirit that lives in the YNF students and also in the staff and the incredible faculty who return each summer. It is a special and profoundly devoted community, something I have not witnessed elsewhere.

Action research is widely used in professional research, but unlike most academic research methodology, action research doesn’t stand back and wait for non-practitioners to deliver findings. Action research is led by the people inside the work, with ongoing hypotheses, experiments, and discoveries leading to improved practice along the way.

El Sistema Greece is a free music education program open to all children in Greece. Because our students come from more than 30 different countries, the impact of the work we do, both with refugee children and with the larger local community encompassing both migrants and natives, is twofold.