Marie Thadal and I met on Alignable the summer of 2021 and started talking about ITIAH Angels for Learning and the great work they were doing to benefit the young girls attending École Mère Louise (EML) elementary school, located in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. I expressed the desire we had at Piano Marvel to provide piano lessons and Piano Marvel subscriptions to deserving children around the world. Marie invited me to attend a meeting with the members of ITIAH on August 4, 2021, as a special guest to discuss how we could share the joy of music with the students they supported. I was inspired by their mission and started to think outside the box. We needed to create a revenue stream dedicated to providing Piano Marvel subscriptions for deserving children. I already knew about a high school senior project that a young teenage girl named Leah Pollock started in collaboration with Pathways to English. She was donating her time and using Piano Marvel to teach piano lessons to children living at an orphanage in Haiti. She inspired us to gift Piano Marvel subscriptions to these children, so they could have their own subscriptions.
To help with the cost of subscriptions, we produced a 4-part video series that we put out on YouTube in April 2021 called Piano Unstrung. The outro for the fourth and final video explains our desire to give back and raise money to give Piano Marvel subscriptions to deserving children around the world. The piano in this series met its end in the fourth video as it fell from a cliff as Aaron Garner played the song’s last note. We sold pieces of the piano to raise money to pay for Piano Marvel subscriptions for these children. We also decided to match whatever we made to double the number of subscriptions to be gifted. You can watch the Piano Unstrung series here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSDmuyICT9dsxIo5mtjin7obOCm54RDSa. The sale is no longer happening, but it was the first act of Piano Marvel’s charity arm to give back.
After that, Michelle Robison, our Director of Teacher Certification and Education, and I started looking for Piano Marvel certified teachers who would be willing to donate their time to teach the girls at EML and we would donate Piano Marvel subscriptions. Many of you at ITIAH Angels, including Magnolia Glothen-Brown, General Secretary at Itiah Angels for Learning, worked hard to collect digital pianos and MIDI cables to ship to EML in Haiti, so the girls could begin their piano lessons. There were many obstacles along the way, including customs workers in Haiti who were kidnapped, making it difficult for the shippers, who had to wait for some time to load the keyboards into the shipping container. In time, the keyboards and MIDI cables made their way to Port-Au-Prince to the elementary school, but the violence in the streets has made it impossible for the students to walk to school and attend consistently. To date, we haven’t been able to connect our volunteer teachers with their hopeful students in Haiti. However, we hope that one day, that will be possible.
We have been holding monthly challenges for our Piano Marvel Community since 2018. We choose a genre or theme for each challenge. Members of the Piano Marvel Community participate by playing the songs designated as part of the challenge in the Music Library, and pass them off when they earn 96% or above. They earn golden tickets or minutes depending on the challenge and compete to play the most songs or earn the most minutes before the challenge ends. We were inspired by a few people who won first place in different challenges during 2022 and refused their prize, asking if it could be gifted to someone in need. We were inspired by their generosity and the first giving challenge was born! We wanted to donate one penny for every golden ticket earned in the 2022 Christmas Challenge, our only 2-month challenge (November and December) to one of three charities.
- ITIAH Angels for Learning to benefit the young girls attending École Mère Louise (EML) elementary school in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti
- Pathways to English to benefit children in an orphanage in Foyer Coin des Cieu, Haiti
- Club Vallarta, benefiting children attending this after-school program in an underserved community in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
We have been touched by the growing popularity of this giving challenge over the last three years, along with the other giving challenge we hold, called the Hymns Challenge, that happens in August. We have more people participate in every giving challenge, and we can give more to these three organizations each year because of the support and effort of the Piano Marvel Community. They have big hearts, and we are grateful for them and the organizations that help us give back. Marie and everyone at ITIAH Angels for Learning has been a pleasure to work with and we look forward to an ongoing relationship.
By Heidi Garner
Chief Marketing Officer
Piano Marvel
719-252-9359
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