What are we doing?

If you are wondering what we are doing at the Abreu Fellowship Program this is a good place to look. I am writing this blog in an attempt to share with you and in essence give you a bird's eye view of our conference room. The list of speakers who have come in to lead our seminars is impressive, from El Sistema USA senior advisor, non-profit specialists, partnership gurus, scholars on children-at-risk, to authorities on urban education, and El Sistema consultants. We are getting exclusive, exceptional, and expert education in the form of an exercise for the jobs we will hold in the near future.

Fellowship is used sometimes as a synonym for awareness, familiarity, and understanding. At the Abreu Fellowship program, we are practicing all three of these and then some. Our consciousness of topics such as child development, community engagement, creative strategies, program design, marketing, and budgeting is being challenged on a consistent basis through focused seminars guided by brilliant experts in these fields.

In the end, after all the discussions, after studying subjects and deliberating arguments, we don't come up with concrete answers. What we do come up with are a series of potent questions that serve as a pathway towards finding methodology. These questions are powerful and relevant and are crucial in the debate of what we will do in the future. Answering these questions will inevitably shape our strategies and hopefully propel us towards our collective goal. In case you have not heard, our goal is to transform communities through the power of music education. Recent history has unveiled for us the power music education possesses by example: El Sistema Venezuela. Our job is to unfold it and spread it as far as the eye can see. Our eyes are set on making this a reality in communities all over the United States.

I want to share with you some of the questions that are taking shape in our dialogues in the hopes that you might contribute to finding the answers.

I have mentioned in my previous blog entry the idea of "passion driven education", so here is a question for you:

How do you synthesise or structure passion and organization?

Two more questions I want to share with you:

How do you change the perception or the branding of classical music in the United States?

How can what we are doing with El Sistema be an intervention for kids in poverty?

These are some tough questions. We hope to find the answers to these questions and to the dozens more that directly shape our approach to successfully implementing the El Sistema model in the U.S.