History of the Shropshire Music Foundation
In 1998, Slobodan Milosovic ordered Serbian security forces to escalate a ten-year campaign of repression against the Albanian population of Kosova into a scorched-earth ethnic cleansing campaign. After a four-month NATO bombing campaign, Serbian forces withdrew from Kosova in 1999. The decade-long conflict left over 300,000 people without shelter, over 10,000 dead, and mass graves, each containing bodies of up to one hundred civilians, including women and children. The war also created over one million refugees.
Pictures of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo–refugee camps, burned out homes, prisoners of war, mourning women, and traumatized children–moved Liz Shropshire, a Los Angeles composer and music teacher, to undertake a brave and important project for the children of Kosovo beginning in 1999. Drawing on her advanced degrees in musical composition and twenty years’ experience in music and education, she envisioned a musical education program for Kosovo’s refugee children. Liz contacted instrument manufacturers, held fundraising activities, and emptied her savings account, amassing a total of 140 harmonicas, 130 penny whistles, 50 pairs of drumsticks, 4 electric keyboards, 60 beginning piano books, 500 pencils, a portable stereo and a portable tape recorder.
Liz chose as her base of operations the town of Gjakove, one of the cities hardest hit by ethnic cleansing. In Summer and Fall 1999, Liz successfully organized and taught a short-term music program for 300 refugee children at Gjakove’s Mustafa Bakije primary school and the “Brickcamp” transit shelter camp. The programs were called The Kosovo Children’s Music Initiative (KCMI).
During 2000 – 2001, the Shropshire Music Foundation was formally organized and granted tax-exempt status in order to raise funds for KCMI. Programs continued at Mustafa Bakije primary school and were started at Gjakove’s Zecharije Rexha primary school serving 450 students and at Pushmorije Drini, an United Nations-sponsored summer camp serving 400 homeless children with missing or dead parents. Program offerings included daily classes in singing, drumming, pennywhistle, and harmonica, “sing-a-longs,” and performances for families and friends.
In Summer 2001, KCMI returned to the summer camp, now called Pushmorije Ereniku, with a new emphasis on teaching tolerance through human rights-themed vocal music, singing instruction, and performance. Programmatic development was designed to coordinate with changing camp enrollment, which this summer included greater numbers of minority Roma (Gypsy) and Bosniak children.
During 2002 – 2003, KCMI developed new projects serving disabled youth and adults, schoolteachers, and rural populations. Weekly classes in singing, pennywhistle, harmonica, and percussion for elementary and junior high students expanded to serve students from M.Bakije, Z. Rexha, and M. Kapuska Schools as well as the Slovene Village and Konvikt Transit Shelter Camps. In August 2002 and 2003, KCMI students were featured musicians in the “Crossing the Bridges” International Children’s Concert and Festival in Pejë, Kosovo, where they performed their signature song “O Q’Bote e Buker / O What a Wonderful World it Would be if All Men would Live like Brothers.”
In August 2004, the Muscatine (Iowa) Children’s Choir brought ten KCMI students and three youth volunteers to the USA for two weeks of joint concerts throughout Iowa and Illinois. They provided everything, from the plane tickets to the US visa fees. The Kosovar children and youth volunteers stayed in the homes of the American choir members. This was a life-changing experience for all who participated, and the Muscatine Children’s Choir is planning to bring a group of children and adults to Gjakove during Summer 2005.
From 2003 – 2005, KCMI has significantly strengthened its base of local youth volunteers, who now maintain day-to-day programs and perform in concerts with the students. A gifted contingent of thirty volunteers, intensively trained by Liz, now handles instruction and lesson plans for all of our regular music classes, as well as new volunteer and school teacher training. Burim Vraniqi, an extremely talented young adult from Gjakove, is Kosovo Program Director. Through musical education and teacher training programs, KCMI now reaches approximately 1,000 children in Kosova every year.
In August 2004, the Muscatine (Iowa) Children’s Choir brought ten KCMI students and three youth volunteers to the USA for two weeks of joint concerts throughout Iowa and Illinois. They provided everything, from the plane tickets to the US visa fees. The Kosovar children and youth volunteers stayed in the homes of the American choir members. This was a life-changing experience for all who participated, and the Muscatine Children’s Choir is planning to bring a group of children and adults to Gjakove during Summer 2005.
In Fall 2004, the Shropshire Music Foundation began an innovative new project serving the war-affected children of Northern Ireland: Peace Through Music Northern Ireland. We offer bi-weekly after-school classes in singing, harmonica, and drumming at community centers in Belfast and Omagh. Through volunteer staff training programs, we are steadily increasing our program capacity and plan to expand to new community centers throughout Northern Ireland in the coming year. Community concerts bring together children from all ongoing probgrams. In partnership with the Republic of Ireland-based Glencree Center for Reconciliation, a camp is being planned for Fall 2005. Disadvantaged children from Belfast and Dublin will be brought to the Glencree Center for a 2-week music camp led by the Kosovo Youth Volunteers.
In Winter 2004, the Shropshire Music Foundation was contacted by Vanessa Contopulos, a music therapist planning to serve the war-traumatized children of Northern Uganda under the auspices of the organization Invisible Children. Contopulos and Invisible Children have received training and free pennywhistles, pennywhistle bags, teaching, and training materials from the Shropshire Music Foundation. Since March 2005, our Child Song Uganda programs have benefited former child soldiers and “night commuter” refugee children fleeing abduction. SMF will continue to provide instruments and training for these programs, and Liz will travel to Uganda in 2006 to oversee the program’s development.
The Shropshire Music Foundation believes that programs teaching children peace through music can change the lives of war-impacted children and help build peace in war-ravaged communities worldwide. We seek to build our organization to touch the lives of war-impacted children around the globe. We are committed to growing, sustaining, and funding these programs so that we can reach thousands more children throughout the world. Our goal is to help children know that they always have the power to make their own choices, that the path of peace leads to happiness and security, that weapons do not equal power and safety, and that violence is not the answer. Sometimes a song can give us the strength to turn away from that which is wrong. Our goal is for these children to become instruments of peace.
Hello there!
I’m very moved by your organization and would like to know more about what you are up to these days. I am a graduate student in Anthropology at San Francisco State University, and have been studying Kosovo for some time now. I’ve been interested in the ability to promote peace through music. If there is someone who would be willing to supply me with some more information or to correspond with, I would be very grateful.
Thank you so much– and all the best to you,
Dominique Devine
Hello Dominique!
I will be graduating from Brigham Young University in Anthropology this December and am also interested in using music to bring cultures and people together. Have you found a way to be involved?
Sincerely,
Jasmine Low
Dear Dominique and Jasmine,
Please feel free to call or email me if you have not already been in contact with SMF. I am a SMF board member coordinating a research effort that we hope will involve many disciplines some day; music, psychology, peace studies, education, literacy, and anthropology, to name a few. The power of the SMF program is quite remarkable.
There are also student initiated “Students for Shropshire” groups set up at the Eastman School of Music as well as at the University of North Texas. The UNT group is working to make this an interdisciplinary effort, including of students of many different majors. You are welcome to check these groups out via Facebook, and get on their group lists. We would welcome you considering initiating groups at your own universities as well!
You may google my telephone and email off the University of North Texas College of Music website if you have any questions.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,
Terri Sundberg
Associate Professor of Flute
University of North Texas College of Music
Thank you Terri! And Jasmine, my email is dominique.devine@gmail.com, if you’d like to get in touch.
Best,
Dominique
Hey Dominique!
My name is Brittney and I’m a co-founder of the UNT group in support of the Shropshire Foundation. I wanted to send you a link to our facebook group, which is the main source for information about events that we’ll be hosting. Although you’re not physically in the area, we’d love to have you join our group and invite others to as well — the more ideas, the better! We are aiming to have our first huge event sometime in January, so any input you may have would be greatly appreciated. My email address is brittneybalkcom@yahoo.com if you want to get in touch!
Thanks!
Brittney
Hi all!
My name is Micah Hendler, and I’m a music and international studies major at Yale. I’m also deeply interested in studying/implementing music’s power towards peacemaking in conflict regions. I spent last summer working as a music counselor at Seeds of Peace, a summer camp and dialogue program for teens from the Middle East and South Asia, and I’m hoping this summer to do music-for-peace research/work in Jerusalem between Israelis and Palestinians, but I’m still looking for organizations with which to work. If any of you have ideas or contacts with organizations in the Middle East, or good academic work on this subject I can read (I’m doing significant background research before I go for the first half of my senior thesis) I would be more than appreciative.
More broadly, I would love to learn more about the SMF – it looks like a really incredible organization.
Thanks!
Micah
Hey there this is my first Comment on a Blog….the reason i am posting this is to clearly show my gratitude to the one who provided this great info…it reminds me why i love the internet…thanks
I would like to say “wow” what a inspiring post. This is really a great article. Keep doing!!
I am singer-songwriter. I am very interested in music therapy and organizations such as these. I would love to help with the Shropshire Music Foundation. I am from South Africa and currently attending BYU. I hope to one day start my own NGO. If anyone has any advice or tips I would love to hear from you.