PARTNER

UNESCO – Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia

ABF ACTIONS

ABF incurs:

THE PROJECT

The programme aims at enhancing the psychosocial support of disadvantaged children who live in vulnerable regions. Through the creation of regional choirs and other educational activities, ABF aims at offering empowerment opportunities to participants and to their communities, by using music as a tool to strengthen their skills, to stimulate their creativity, to promote collaboration and to offer them more chances of success in life. As with all education projects carried out by the Andrea Bocelli Foundation, the effort is strategically aligned with objective no. 4 (Quality Education) for 2030 of the United Nations for sustainable development. The Andrea Bocelli Foundation and UNESCO also signed a memorandum of understanding with the aim of cooperating on musical education projects as an empowerment tool; these projects will be developed and made known in the upcoming months.

When ABF started to develop the program Voices of in 2014, the Foundation took action in order to add musical education within key projects in Italy as well as in Haiti.

In Haiti, in January 2016, the Foundation launched the pilot project Voices of Haiti and introduced musical education in 30 schools which were supported by the local partner, Fondation St Luc (including 5 schools ABF-Fondation St Luc). From a pool of 12,000 students enrolled in the schools, ABF then selected 60 among the most talented boys and girls to form the first “Voices of Haiti” choir (see project sheet page). However, In Italy ABF took action in order to introduce the best practices in musical education as part of the official curriculum for the schools built by the Foundation after the earthquake that hit central Italy in 2016 (Sarnano 2018, Muccia 2019, Camerino 2020). More recently, in November 2019, the Centrozerosei nursery school in Lajatico (Tuscany), which is Maestro Bocelli’s birthplace, also adopted the same methodology.

The personal transformation experienced by children, and by the communities in which they live, and witnessed in recent years exceeded any expectations and led ABF to invest in this strategic approach more and more.

THE CONTEXT

The programme Voices of was launched in 2014 and resulted from the work of a multidisciplinary team who designed an innovative methodology aimed at social inclusion and personal expression through musical education.

All the students come from a vulnerable economic, social and political context. Through music, they are able to find a way to consolidate the logics of discipline, cooperation and manage to briefly free themselves of the grip of poverty. Music therefore becomes another way to support social and intellectual development not just of the individual but of the entire community. Through music and the beauty expressed by music, there is the will for international interest to focus again on the conditions in the Country.