Infuse U.S. Classrooms with Music for Learning!

Dear Friends,

We're excited to share that this month, we've connected with special teachers who feel ready to create homegrown GITC programs within their own communities in Oregon, Michigan, Maryland, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida! At this time, we are structuring an array of services thanks to your contributions, in order to fund, train, coach, and support their efforts. Your gifts are the wheels on our bus!

The first step is gathering this "cohort," a common educational term for teachers who are training together and who will become a solid affinity group while they go through the learning and launching process. The members of this cohort will meet as a group every month, and in addition, will receive one on one coaching from our staff.

Each new leader is exceptionally skilled, motivated, and experienced in our inclusive, easy approach to making music. They've been working with the method in their own classrooms. They are a mix of music teachers and classroom teachers, and each one brings their own area of expertise to the cohort.

We'll begin preparing short instructional videos (2 minutes or less) giving pointers for each step of sharing about the program, arranging for teaching space, communicating with the local educators about the learning opportunity, ordering instruments and books, and the small personal ways our faculty reaches out to the teachers they are training each week to offer encouragement, songs, and reminders. This way the new leaders can get very specific pointers exactly when they need them.

This grassroots approach to increasing students' access to learning to make music is so different than corporate structure. There are no cookie cutters in our kitchen. Every new program will be unique because of the leader, the size and location of the community, the local culture and traditions, and the policies and practices of the school district. Some of the leaders live in small towns, in rural county districts that the GlobalGiving map couldn't even find! Others live in middle to large sized cities. We're excited to support this process, and to keep you informed along the way with progress, stories, and outcomes. 

We leave you with this beautiful poem from Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. The greatest achievement was at first and for a  a time a dream.            The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs.

Thank you for your support, Friends. Please keep us in your thoughts, and give when you can. We are in this new time of growth together, with gratitude for all your charity is allowing us to begin to accomplish.

Very best wishes,

Jess

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