Mellon Foundation Helps Music To Life Offer Musicians Entrepreneurial Training To Create Change

The national nonprofit Music To Life, shaped for decades but officially founded in 2018 by folk music legend Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame and daughter Liz Stookey Sunde, has begun the Accelerator Academy Program for social justice musicians funded in part by a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. “For these past 60 years, I have been a participating witness to the power of music to change lives,” said multi-Grammy winner Stookey in a press release . Long committed to creating music with a social conscience, Stookey’s work became a part of history on August 28, 1963 when Peter, Paul and Mary (Stookey, Peter Yarrow, and Mary Travers) performed during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr delivered his iconic I Have a Dream speech.

“This grant from the Mellon Foundation confirms Music to Life’s leadership role in mentoring the social change artist’s transition from inspiring performance to constructive community engagement,” said Stookey. In a recent interview, executive director Liz Stookey Sunde discussed the impact of this award on the nonprofit’s mission, the artists, and the communities served, pointing out that musicians are often “perfectly positioned change makers” because of their relationships with their customer bases. Sunde says Music to Life aims to help talented musicians leave their mark in positive and impactful ways within the communities they serve, going beyond benefit concerts to become part of the “music-driven solutions to community challenges.

” With the Mellon Foundation’s support, Music to Life hopes to train up to 75 musicians each year, prioritizing grassroots and BIPOC artists to develop music-driven programs for communities facing persistent economic, environmental and racial injustice. “Our goal is to enhance the value of the artist,” explains Sunde who has watched Music to Life artists like Cheryl Cawood , who uses her music to support families affected by substance use disorders, effect positive change. It is anticipated that participants will enhance their portfolios with change-driven music initiatives.

“[We’re saying] We want to put you (the musician) in a position where you are actually adding real value through your music to the community by…basically being a creative economic engine, so that you’re getting some return on the programming that you’re planning. You’re actually earning money, but then you’re also benefiting the community, because we’re teaching you how to develop programs that have outcomes,” explains Sunde about the nonprofit’s musician entrepreneur model. “Our signature training that Mellon is really helping us get going is this Academy (Accelerator Academy) Program, which takes them (musician participants) through eight weeks of entrepreneurial training.

And we now have actually the Tuck School at Dartmouth helping us to ensure that…we have the basic kind of entrepreneurial building blocks,” explains Sunde about the program which includes eight weeks of courses for a cohort of 10 artists from varied genres, geographies and generations. Business skills training includes strategic planning, organizing, management and fundraising. With six months of one-on-one coaching, participants work to draft their related grant and pilot program backed with a matching grant from Music to Life.

Sunde believes communities can be healed by music and that right now Music to Life is the only initiative working in the space trying to create musicians as community entrepreneurs. “My goal is to have this be a training model for any music-related organization that has a membership base…our basic template or framework should be a training model to get musicians engaged in a meaningful way. ”.