THE ORCHESTRATING MENTORS STORY
In 2012 we saw the need that young talented students had such as lack of instruments to continue their music education after high school and the support needed to successfully apply to college to transition into economic independence. We decided to launch the Orchestrating Mentors Pilot initiative that year.
The Orchestrating Mentors program provides training to prepare teens and young adults to enter the workforce and find meaningful employment. Participants gain hands-on work experience in music education and arts administration as a means to fill current educational gaps and provide a pathway to self-sufficiency.
The program was developed in collaboration with students like Randy, the first student to graduate and continue to college to pursue his passion: cello and music education.
“The Orchestrating Mentors program gave me the tools thousands of applicants without a mentor are missing which is how to build a resume, learn how to network in the music world, how to practice efficiently, how to fill out an audition sheet, how to submit a pre-screening audition tape, provided me a camera and microphone to record my audition tape, how to email a music professor for a cello lesson.Not many young adults my age can say that, but the Orchestrating Mentors program made all this possible for me.” Randy
Randy graduated Fredonia School of Music at SUNY and is completed a Bachelor of Music Education. He is currently completing his masters at John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair University and is employed at Orchestrating Dreams as a cello and viola instructor.