Giving Children and Young People the Opportunity to Experience the Joy of Music

Jan 20

Who: GIVE MUSIC A CHANCE - NORWAY

What: A non-profit organization that works to provide musical instruments for children and young people in developing countries and conflict zones.

Where: Congo, Haiti, Mozambique and Palestine

Project period: 2023

Web: Give music a chance

Give Music a Chance - Norway is a non-profit organization that works to provide musical instruments for children and young people in developing countries and conflict zones. We collect used and broken musical instruments in Norway, repair them and donate them to approximately 20 partner music schools in among others Congo, Haiti, Mozambique and Palestine.

Our philosophy is based on two basic pillars:

Music must become sustainable.
We reuse instruments and train instrument repair technicians to maintain and repair instruments.

Music is a tool for development
We give children and young people the opportunity to experience the joy of music.

What do we do?

We collect used musical instruments in Norway. We believe in reuse, and we know that instruments can have a long life if they are well looked after. We collect instruments at music festivals, we have fixed drop-off points where anyone can donate instruments to us at any time, and we work with brass bands and orchestras. Collaboration partners in 2022 include Bergenfest, NMF Hordaland, 4Sound Bergen and Bergen Kjøtt.

We currently collaborate with the Belgian non-profit organization Music Fund, which repairs used instruments and distributes them to children and young people in developing countries and conflict zones. They have been doing this since 2005, and they have so far collected about 10,000 instruments, and repaired and donated more than 6,000 instruments. Up to four times a year, we pack the instruments we have collected and send them with our partner Sea-Cargo from Bergen to Music Fund in Belgium. They check and repair the instruments before they are sent out to the projects.

Together with the Music Fund, we also finance the training of repair technicians for musical instruments, both locally in the projects and through apprenticeship programs in Europe, and we support the creation of local repair workshops associated with our collaborative projects. We want to support our partners so that they become autonomous and sustainable. We do this through donations of instruments, training in maintenance and repair, and tools and spare parts to maintain and repair these. We work with a limited number of partner schools, so that we ensure direct, personal and long-term relationships.

In the future, we want to build our own repair workshop in Bergen and train new instrument repairers, both locally and at the partner music schools, based on the model and transferred expertise from Music Fund.