Dear Friends and Supporters, I hope 2019 has started well for you all. I started Music for Hope alongside young Salvadorian musicians in 1996 and it has been such an honour to see it grow from a tiny seedling project teaching music to twenty children in one community,...
Protect the Animals In actual fact, only one of the groups—Impacto Musical in Amando López, kept with the idea of using imagination and fantasy to make a social commentary. They chose a story that bore more than a passing resemblance to a tropical (local) variation of...
Keeping up the momentum. The songs we’d recorded were a great start, but all the bands mentioned how difficult it was to think of an idea and then turn it into lyrics. It took a long time, they said, and there was a sense that it would be difficult to continue—the...
I went back to the Bajo Lempa in the summer of 2018 to catch up with the teachers and the groups and to see how they’d got on with the challenge I’d left them with the previous year. They’d done themselves proud. All the groups had at least one song ready to record,...
Written by Andrew Redden Music for Hope ‘Thanks to this project, I can play my guitar like this, Playing songs in the wind, Expressing our feelings.’ (Fuerza Tropical, “Thank you Music for Hope”, 2018) The idyllic scene that these lyrics paint, of people...
In the summer of 2014 I had just graduated and was about to go out into the real world, but first, I had the trip of a lifetime to make. I had become a volunteer for Music for Hope a couple of years earlier through a friend who was also at the University of...