For the second time in three years, Heart of Los Angeles is proud to be the recipient of a multi-year award of support from The Music Man Foundation. In 2022, Heart of LA was one of just nine organizations to receive an inaugural Meredith Willson Award, which provided $500,000 of funding over two years. This week, recipients of the 2024 Meredith Willson Awards were announced, and Heart of LA’s work has again been recognized with an award of $300,000 over the next two years. Heart of LA is incredibly proud of our partnership with The Music Man Foundation, which has once again reinforced its commitment to the youth of Los Angeles and underlined the importance of high-quality music education.
The Music Man Foundation is named after the Tony-winning musical written by Meredith Willson. Its mission is to empower organizations using music to catalyze enduring change and to amplify its founders’ musical legacy. Just as Harold Hill, the con-man-turned-hero of the foundation’s namesake musical, discovers by the end of the play, music has a unique ability to knit communities together and be a catalyst for change. Music facilitates connections between teachers and students, musicians and audiences, individuals and their or another’s cultural heritage, and of course between members of an ensemble.
Take, for example, a recent off-campus performance event for the Eisner Intergenerational Choir. An aspiring young author (and Heart of LA alumnus) was chatting with another ensemble member who happened to be a recently retired author. Upon discovery of this shared passion for the written word, meaningful professional connections were made – another example of music’s power to forge bonds in unexpected ways. At Heart of LA, the journey doesn’t end when a child learns an instrument, that’s only the beginning.
“You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to make today worth remembering.” – Harold Hill in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man
As the character Harold Hill articulates above, waiting around and hoping for a better tomorrow is a recipe for regret. This truth animates everything Heart of LA strives to do: make the most of today – every day – so that every tomorrow can be brighter for LA’s youth. While the kind of change Heart of LA and The Music Man Foundation seek to affect takes longer than two acts and an intermission – it does happen. Look no further than Heart of LA alumnus and Board Fellow Ailen Salazar Bravo, who recently bought her first house just a few blocks away from our site at Augustus Hawkins Nature Park, in the very neighborhood where she grew up. This is the kind of reinvestment in community, long-term connection to people and places, and disruption of generational poverty that drives the work we do at Heart of LA. Partners like The Music Man Foundation – and people like you – make this work possible.
Why not take Harold Hill’s advice and make today worth remembering by supporting Heart of Los Angeles?
