Action for Music: Empowering Children Through Music Education for Over a Decade

More than 300 children learn to give “the best version of themselves” with Fundación Acción por la Música, with more than a decade of history

MADRID, 21 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –

More than 300 children in vulnerable situations in the Community of Madrid enjoy a safe leisure space and learn to give the best version of themselves through music, thanks to the work that the Foundation has been carrying out for more than a decade. Action for Music, which more than 1,000 children and adults have gone through in these ten years.

“We are the competition to youth bands,” explains to Europa Press the president of Action for Music, María Guerrero, who founded this project in the district of Tetuán in 2013 “with cardboard instruments” inspired by the Orchestras and Choirs project. by the Venezuelan master José Antonio Abreu, who despite having been replicated in more than 60 countries, did not have anything similar in Spain.

The Foundation’s first orchestra was born to provide musical training, educate in values ​​and offer psychosocial accompaniment since then to those thousand minors in fundamentally vulnerable situations, but also to people with intellectual disabilities or older people who suffer from unwanted loneliness.

Transforming society through music is the objective of this entity that currently develops projects in schools, parishes or cultural centers in the Madrid district of Tetuán, as well as in the town of Alcalá de Henares.

Its leader insists on the purpose of “limiting the risk of exclusion” among the members of the orchestra, an “effective” job, he emphasizes, because they have built “bonds of friendship” and “healthier” relationships that result in greater attachment to the studio and an occupation of free time that prevents them from being recruited by other types of organizations harmful to them such as youth gangs.

“We start at an age immediately before they begin to recruit them, so that when the time comes, they are already integrated and do not need that sense of belonging that the gangs use,” emphasizes Guerrero, who emphasizes that the orchestra “is like a family”, while expressing the “pride” he feels “for a job well done.

FREE ACTIVITIES

These are free activities for the participants, most of them children, who even receive the instrument on loan so that the economic situation does not represent a barrier to their musical development.

Furthermore, the lessons, which are usually taught two or three days a week for two hours each afternoon, allow young people to be offered this safe leisure space with music as the protagonist.

Likewise, musical training is received in a group, something important for its promoters, since values ​​such as teamwork, listening or camaraderie are encouraged – they emphasize -, in addition to others such as perseverance.

For all this, they emphasize that the skills they learn “go beyond the musical” and have repercussions on their studies, helping them to improve and offering extra motivation. Wanting to be the best version of themselves is the idea that the Foundation transmits, something that, they clarify, does not imply being the best, but giving the best of each one, they explain.

From the Foundation they defend the positive impact that the work they do also has on families, whose self-esteem, like that of the minors themselves, is reinforced when they go on stage in such symbolic places as the Teatro Real, the National Auditorium of Music, the Moncloa Palace or the National Prado Museum.

The Action for Music project and its objective of “social transformation through culture” has already made an international leap, a projection that its president advocates promoting from the public as a recognition for Spain.

STRENGTHEN NETWORKS

Apart from musical training, the Action for Music Foundation develops other activities such as workshops to strengthen family networks, for which the entity relies on schools and parishes, but also on its psychosocial team.

Adding the rest of the people who participate in the training offered by the Foundation, there are nearly 400 people who benefit from this initiative of a foundation in which around 20 people work.

In June 2023, the Foundation held a major concert at the National Auditorium on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the celebration of which still continues and will have another milestone at the end of November, when the premiere of a documentary is scheduled to take advantage of the proximity of International Children’s Day. Music (November 22).

In addition to this social intervention, the Acción por la Música Foundation has a corporate volunteer program that they offer to companies that want to generate a positive social impact, companies that can also collaborate with the work carried out by the entity by booking concerts.

Its president also highlights the survival of the community beyond the time in which the young people receive the training, since some of the first children to participate have continued collaborating or maintaining contact with the foundation, María Guerrero explained.