Our Emergency Funding Appeal

The Impact of COVID-19 has hit our charity, MusicFirst NI, like so many and we are doing everything in our power to raise funds that were lost due to lockdown and impact of social distancing on music education. All our usual events and fundraising efforts, including our big annual 2-stage music festival celebration – ‘Forte Festival’ have had to be cancelled. Our lessons were restricted to digital and even now we cannot resume normal music education as it once was. While we are adapting how we do things, we are running out of funds to pay for our doors to stay open and we are appealing to all to help us raise funds to ensure our community can survive this pandemic and reach January 2021! Please donate and save our community if you can or help us by donating your time to creatively fundraise for us, or simply shop via AmazonSmile with ‘MusicFirst NI’ as your registered charity

MusicFirstNI is a not-for-profit association whose purpose is the advancement of music education for children and adults in Northern Ireland. We provide: a centre for music lessons, classes and workshops; qualified and vetted tutors; free performance opportunities for developing musicians; and the organisation and entry of developing musicians for examinations, festivals and competitions.

We offer a unique community for music education unlike any other organisation with similar music education objectives. Our inspiration for our name, ‘MusicFirst’, was to create a community where education and enjoyment of music as well as the benefits to individual’s mental health were the forefront of its purposes as opposed to a business school model. Our volunteers and tutor collective run MusicFirst NI voluntarily and we have cut-out the middleman of music education businesses to offer exceptional quality tuition at a highly competitive price.

Studying music improves full brain function - nurturing creativity, problem solving, improved focus and reduced stress levels. These are all essential skills for our current climate and learning these while having fun is even better! Further benefits include the fostering of self-confidence and personal discipline in setting out and achieving progressive goals within a supporting environment and community. These benefits are evident through the growing numbers of learners enrolled, feedback from members via semi-annual surveys along with studentsʼ personal exam results and successful performances. These benefits also include the close syllabus liaison between our MFNI Tutors which ensures the members are being taught extensive musical knowledge which compliments all their classes that they receive tuition for, as well as the working relations between tutors to ensure each student receives the best and most appropriate education suited for their needs.

During this Covid-19 situation, members have said the continuation of their music education via digital platform with our tutors has been the highlight of their week and helped them personally cope with the impact of Covid-19. Covid-19 has greatly impacted our charitable aims we hoped to achieve but we have strived to continue our mental health benefits and community spirit. Although we are young, the scope of our charitable activities has only begun and to close our charity at this point would put our charitable goal of a diverse musical community right back to the start. Our members will be forced to go without our unique benefits for the unknown future.