Giving Compass' Take:

• Jeffrey Walker explains how he collaborates with stakeholders - including industry experts, nonprofits, and schools - to bring appropriate, impactful music interventions to cities at scale. 

• How can these lessons be transferred to other issues? What partners could you engage to increase your impact? 

• Learn more about the impact of collaborative philanthropy. 

We started this conversation with Jennifer McCrea and a guy named Quincy Jones. Quincy’s a well-known record producer. We sat there in his foundation, and he was going to give some money to an orphanage in Cambodia, and we said, “Great! That’s awesome. Let’s do some more things.”  Then we said, “Q, what about music? Shouldn’t we do something in the music world? What really moves you?” We started talking about kids and the kids that don’t have it, particularly the kids in the inner city.

Schools have been closing down music programs left and right, and there’s some things around like VH1, and there’s nonprofits.

So, over time, we brought Berklee College of Music together. We brought teacher unions together. We brought people in each of the cities together, and there are 70 nonprofits.  And we bring them into the room, and we got the Grammys to say, “We’re willing to be the incubator, that orchestrator, because we don’t have all the answers, but we care about music. And we have a lot of artists that care about music with the Recording Academy. So, let’s work on this together.”

So, rather than focusing just on an NGO to work with, we started saying, Let’s focus on cities. So, we picked Philadelphia and Nashville for example, to say, Do we share common goals? But the problem is: we want kids to have more exposure to music.  I grew up with music, and I think it transformed my life. It teaches leadership, it teaches… scores go up. There’s lots of evidence of what happens. So, let’s make sure that all kids, K through 6, have music, to take some music program in school. Not after school. Then let’s make sure kids, 7 through 12, have culturally relevant music.

That was whole… we had days of discussions, negotiations because I’m not here to say, Long Island wants to teach classical music. Awesome. But it doesn’t fit every city. Little Kids Rock wants to teach modern rock. Awesome. But it doesn’t fit every city. So, how do we say, “We’re going to empower instead the head of the music programs in each of the cities to figure out what’s culturally relevant, so we motivate the kids, and we motivate the parents too.”  Parents get around this. Energy goes up. The kids show up at school more often. So, that’s what we did.

We have some common goals by city. We’re helping them raise resources. We’re helping them network. We’re helping artists now start taking ownership of the cities themselves and saying this is important to them. Bringing social media strategies around this one.

Read the full interview with Jeffrey Walker about making impact at scale by Denver Frederick at Business of Giving.