We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Vincent James. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Vincent below.

Hi Vincent, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

How many of us ever thought we would be an author? Certainly I didn’t see that in my future. But one day I was drawn to a teleseminar called “How everyone has a book inside them they need to write. I was an engineer by trade but had focused all my non-working hours on my true passion which was music. As a result, I didn’t consider myself an expert on either topic so why write a book. But on that teleseminar, a light bulb went off in my head and I thought “What about a book of inspirational stories of how music impacted people’s lives” Sort of a Chicken Soup for the Music Lovers Soul (which did not exist) That inspiration in the spring of 2014 was the beginning of my travels down the music education advocacy path which in June 2015 birthed the first book in the “88 Ways Music Can Change Your Life” book series. This lead to the creation of Teach Music Week in 2015 and then Kids Music Day 2016. To celebrate these holidays, Keep Music Alive now partners with over 1,200 music schools, stores and organizations to offer a free lesson to new students and hold special events that benefit children playing music. This further led to the creation of our Musical Instrument Petting Zoo program where we visit schools, libraries and community festivals with guitars, ukuleles, keyboards and dozens of different percussion instruments for kids to play with. We now host over 60 musical instrument petting zoo events per year in addition to coordinating and promotinog Teach Music Week/Kids Music Day. Each of these programs was created in a way to uniquely approach the challenge of wanting more kids to play music because of the many benefits they would receive. The more we dug into the research how exactly how music benefits kids (and the scientic reasons explaining how), we knew we needed to double down our efforts to create as much impact as possible. In the end, everything we do at Keep Music Alive is to help more kids (and adults too) reap the educational, therapuetic and social benefits of playing music.

Vincent, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Keep Music Alive isn’t about trying to turn every child into becoming a professional musician, although some will be. Our ultimate goal is to help give every child the best chance of success no matter what career path they choose later in life. Playing music is what gives them that edge in life. Children who learn to play music during their developmental years actually see the pipe connecting the left/logical and right/creative sides of their brain get bigger. This leads to more creative problem solving and thinking outside the box. The research shows kids playing music doing better in math, science and reading comprehension not to mention the “soft” skills that are gained including patience, perservence and discipline. Though still early in our non-profits lifetime, we are proud of the impact we are having as our programs reach over 10,000 kids each year. We’re also honored to have numerous celebrities supporting our mission as Kids Music Day Ambassadors including Julie Andrews, Jack Black, Vanessa Williams, Kenny Loggins, Sarah McLachlan and more.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One story we like to share revolves around one of our favorite sayings which is “Silence Never Means No”. How many times do we reach out a someone to ask for support, a referral or really anything and get no answer. When this happens, often the first “story” we like to tell ourselves is that they aren’t interested in helping, or they don’t like us, they want us to leave them or alone or any number of negative thoughts. The truth is almost always different – emails get stuck in junk folders, end up at the bottom of a long inbox, the person receiving the email gets distracted after meaning to respond, or maybe they are away for a few weeks or have a illness in their family. There are so many reasons why someone didn’t respond to your email and we have to stop telling ourselves that negative story. Several years back we began reaching out to celebrities to see if they would contribute a story to our first “88 Ways Music Can Change Your Life” book. One of the celebrities we had reached out to a number of times through their agent, manager and publicist was Julie Andrews. Over a two year period we never received a single respond good or bad from any of Ms. Andrew’s people. At this point we could easily have been discouraged and decided never to contact them again. But instead, when we were looking for our first Kids Music Day Ambassadors, we decided to write to Ms Andrews team again and this time almost immediately received a respond that said “Ms Andrews would love to be a Kids Music Day Ambassador”. You could have knocked us over with a feather. When there is someone you want to connect with to further your cause or your business. Always believe its okay to continue contacting them with new ideas, new questions, etc unless they explicitly wrote back to stay please stop contacting them. In our experience that almost never happens. So remember, when you don’t receive a response to an email, don’t start telling yourself a negative story about why they didn’t respond….wait a week, 2 weeks or a few months, however long is appropriate and try again with the same or different idea. Remember: Silence Never Means No!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

We started down our music education advocacy path with our book series “88 Ways Music Can Change Your Life”. We realized over a period of several years that no matter what we did we weren’t able to generate significant sales despite donating 50% of the proceeds to other music education non-profits. We eventually realized we needed to spend more time on our other programs including Teach Music Week, Kids Music Day and our year-round Musical Instrument Petting Zoo events. This was a difficult decision as the book series is our baby that started what eventually became Keep Music Alive. Sometimes as a business owner (or non-profit founder), we need to make those difficult decisions to do what will utlimately bring the organization the most benefit.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.KeepMusicAlive.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keepmusicaliveorg
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/keepmusicalivemission
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/keepmusicalive
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redir

Image Credits
All images can be credited to Keep Music Alive