The Joel Foundation has pledged multi-year support to Yale’s Music in Schools Initiative. Established in 2007 with the creation of an endowed fund by the Yale College Class of 1957, the Music in Schools Initiative facilitates collaborations between artists from Yale College and the Yale School of Music and twenty-eight public schools in New Haven to offer free music and voice lessons to children.
Alexis Roderick Joel, co-chair of the Joel Foundation, announced the pledge over the summer at Yale’s biennial Symposium on Music in Schools. The two-day symposium, which was attended by over fifty music educators from around the country, offers a forum for school administrators, teaching artists, and community leaders to discuss how music education might best become an integral and important part of the curriculum of public schools.
“The arts being available can change everything,” said Joel in her keynote address. “That’s why we do this work.”