“Northeast Kansas City may have a reputation for crime and poverty, but the Harmony Project is changing children’s lives for the better there through music,” writes Patrick Neas in Wednesday’s (6/22) Kansas City Star. “Started in January 2015 with 33 students, the Harmony Project provides instruments and six hours of weekly music instruction to children from low-income families. The program’s organizers say all of this attention is already showing results with higher grades and more stability in the lives of 60 students. Some of those student musicians will perform a piece by Antonin Dvorák alongside four brass players from the Kansas City Symphony Sunday at the Kansas City Museum.… Harmony Project founder Margaret Martin … started the first Harmony Project in Los Angeles in 2001. It provided instruments and tuition-free music lessons to thousands of the city’s most vulnerable children.… Besides earning better grades in grade school and high school, Harmony Project students are much more likely to attend and finish college.… The Harmony Project now has programs in Miami, New Orleans and Tulsa, as well as Kansas City.… Kansas City’s classical music community has enthusiastically embraced the Harmony Project.”
Posted June 23, 2016
Pictured: Lizbeth Chavezz, a student of the Harmony Project program in Kansas City, rehearsed recently. Photo by Brian Davidson / Kansas City Star
