FOUNDER

Dr. Margaret Martin

Margaret Martin holds a doctorate in Public Health from UCLA in ‘Community Health Science’, and additional advanced degrees in Behavior Science, Health Education, and Population and Family Health. She Founded Harmony Project in 2001, which has provided instruments and tuition-free group and private music lessons to thousands of the most vulnerable children in Los Angeles as a means of positive youth development and social inclusion.

Harmony Project currently maintains numerous full-time youth orchestras, and works to develop youth music ensembles throughout LA’s low-income neighborhoods. On November 4th, 2009, in a White House ceremony, Dr. Martin accepted the Coming Up Taller Award from First Lady Michele Obama, on behalf of Harmony Project. Administered by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in association with the National Endowment for the Arts, Coming Up Taller is the nation’s highest honor for an arts-based youth program. Harmony Project was the only California program to receive the award in 2009.

Dr. Margaret is working with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association (through the LA Phil’s ‘Youth Orchestra Los Angeles’ initiative) and researchers from Northwestern University and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Beyond the Bell (after-school) Branch to document the impact of music education and youth orchestra participation on disadvantaged youth. Dr. Margaret has worked in low-income communities as an educator and community organizer for more than 30 years. She is a passionate proponent of arts education and its capacity to transform the lives of children with few resources, along with the neighborhoods in which they live, and she works to seed music programs for at-risk youth in other communities. She is also a published author and illustrator, a produced playwright, composer and lyricist, and the mother of three grown children, all of whom happen to be artists.

Dr. Margaret Martin describes her inspiration for Harmony Project:

“A posse of hard-core LA gang-bangers walked through a Farmer’s Market on a Sunday morning: tattoos, shaved heads, oversized clothing – and attitude! A tiny kid was playing Brahms on a tiny violin. The gang members stopped to listen. After 5 or 6 minutes, I watched those gang members pull out their own money and lay it gently in the little kid’s case. I was earning a doctorate in Public Health at UCLA at the time, focused on what it takes to make a healthy community. That day, those gang members handed me a powerful lesson. They led me to research linking early-sustained music learning to improvements in math, language, cognition, brain development and behavior – the basis for Harmony Project.

I couldn’t help those gang members, but they changed my life. In 2001, after I completed my doctoral degree, I founded Harmony Project with 36 high need students, a $9,000 check from the Rotary Club of Hollywood, and a small group of dedicated teachers and board members. The money quickly ran out, but the teachers agreed to teach their students for free while we struggled to raise funds to continue the program.

Ten years later, we’re still here. We have built more than 10 orchestras and an institution in Los Angeles that is inspiring similar programs in communities throughout the country. In 2009, we received the President’s Coming Up Taller Award, the nation’s highest honor for an arts-based youth program.

Harmony Project’s success is the result of the hard work and commitment of our students, our families, our teachers, our staff, our board, and our terrific community partners and sponsors all pulling together. Together we celebrate the tremendous talent and potential of young people the rest of the city would never otherwise hear from or appreciate. With music, we bring discipline, hope and joy – and transform families and communities. Our students remain enrolled in school, learn to give back to their communities, and our own scholarship program helps them go on to college. Together, there is no limit to what we can achieve.”