- We believe that listening to live music can improve the quality of life for people who are sick or dying. We believe that health care activity directors would like to offer live music to their patients, but they can only book limited performances with their available budget.
- We believe that volunteer performances by music students would offer a good alternative to professional bands. We believe that music students and the Directors of their Schools of Music would be willing to provide free concerts for these people for two main reasons:
- they want to improve the quality of life of the underserved people
- they want to get practice at live performance before a real audience.
- Our assumption is more music students would volunteer for live performances to people who are sick or dying if there was an easy way to find and sign up for volunteer performance activities. We assume that more health care activity directors would coordinate music performances for their patients if there was a way to get volunteer performers that they could depend on to provide a good concert.
Music Volunteers is a tool to connect volunteer music performers with people who want to hear them perform. Currently, it is targeted at university music students to perform for patients supervised by health care Activity Directors. On the other hand, it is also targeted to university music directors or professors to adapt a community outreach program for their students. It allows Health Care Activity Directors to register concerts they want to offer their patients. It also allows Music Directors at universities to register their students (or ensembles) as potential performers. It then allows both the Music Directors and Health Care Activity Directors to review who is registered from "the other side" and facilitates booking the student(s) to perform.
There are organizations that bring musicians to volunteer at local facilities. We are different because we want to build the platform expandable to a much wider audiences. We know of no other tool that performs this function. We expect to get people to use the tool at first by direct email marketing to University Music School Directors and Health Care facilities with Activity Directors (our product owner, Julia, has already established contacts with some).
The biggest risk to this project is that there is not currently an organization with budget to support. However, Julia is planning to establish a non-profit that will provide that support and ongoing leadership.