Chicago benefits from a robust youth-focused music education sector boasting many well-established and successful nonprofit organizations with distinctive missions, differing approaches and students engaged. CMPI provides the opportunity for these various organizations with like-minded missions to work together across the entire musical pathway.
As a major market for orchestral music and the third largest school district in the nation, the Mellon Foundation strongly believes that music education leaders in Chicago are poised to address the challenge identified by Mellon in ways that can inform national efforts and models for other regions.
Mellon is funding collaborative initiatives in major urban centers, hoping to improve the pathways for highly talented and dedicated young musicians from historically underrepresented communities who have committed to the goal of becoming professional musicians. This is matter of access and opportunity, not one of a lack of talent. Mellon-supported consortia are already working in Philadelphia and are concurrently beginning in Boston.