Community Music School was founded in 1992 to help keep music an integral part of a child’s education, even as it was disappearing from public schools. We started our first music camp for children soon after our incorporation, and created a camp specifically for teenagers seven years later. A four-day camp experience for adults started in 2016, in part to continue offering musical connections to our graduates (as well as their parents), but also to help subsidize the cost of our youth programs. Over the years, we’ve put on a wide variety of concerts, hosted workshops, developed a free online database to connect students with music teachers, created ongoing musical ensembles, and distributed donated instruments to those who need them. In 2023, we started providing a fully-subsidized beginning music class to students in Live Oak, one of our county’s underserved neighborhoods; at the end of a student’s first semester, they get to keep the instrument (ukulele or melodica) they’ve learned.