The goal of the Community Music Center is to strengthen the child's academic, social and emotional life. I have been impressed by reports from teachers and parents on children's improvement in these areas. The program also has helped to bring about a healing integration in a racially and economically fractured community. Without a doubt, this program has youth, the communities, and the city standing taller! Victoria L. Hamilton, Executive Director, Commission for Arts and Culture, The City of San Diego

After school, from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., three times a week, for 32 weeks of the school year, students from eight elementary schools in San Diego's Barrio Logan area come to the Community Music Center at Cesar Chavez Elementary School to learn to play a musical instrument. Taught by bilingual professional musicians, who come from similar communities and are sensitive to the children's needs and strengths, children study violin, piano, winds, trumpet, and guitar. Students who conscientiously take lessons for two years receive their musical instrument as a gift in a graduation ceremony. With training and instrument in hand, the students go on to become "star players" in middle school bands and orchestras.

Parents' participation is an equally vital part of the program's success. In every class, parents help set up stands or take attendance. Outside the classroom, parents duplicate materials for the teachers, coordinate instrument insurance, raise funds for the students' "Recognition Assemblies," and join the students on field trips to cultural events. Increasingly, parents take classes themselves in English as a Second Language, computers, career development, nutrition, piano and guitar.

Created by nearly a dozen public and private, civic and cultural, arts and education organizations, the Community Music Center was formed in 1993 to address the needs of 5,000 low- and moderate-income families, 90 percent of whom are Mexican-American and African-American. In the best of cases, each adult in the household works full-time at a minimum-wage job. Often mothers are live-in "help" while fathers work night shifts or seek work outside San Diego. After school, many children are left on their own. Therefore, the Community Music Center is much more than a place where the children take music classes. It is a place of hope, opportunity, and celebration not only of children's accomplishments, but also of their own sense of belonging.

As of May 1999, the Community Music Center is sponsored by the La Jolla Chamber Music Society and has become an integral part of its Educational Outreach Program.