Paul Calvert spoke with Founder, Todd Mack, about their work in Israel.

Todd Mack

Music In Common is a non-profit organisation, with a mission to strengthen, empower, educate and connect communities through the universal language of music. Paul Calvert spoke with Founder, Todd Mack, about his work bringing different communities together in Israel, his thoughts on how to begin a process of reconciliation and how Music In Common began.

Paul: What is Music In Common?

Todd: Music In Common is a non-profit organisation, based in the United States. It focuses on community building and community empowerment, through music and multi-media.

Paul: When and why were you started?

Todd: We have been around since 2005. I started the organisation in response to the murder of my friend Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter. It was a way to counter the violence and the hatred that motivated his murder.

Paul: Are you in many different countries?

Todd: We work primarily in the United States and Israel/Palestine, but we have also done some work in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Far East.

Paul: What programmes do you run?

Todd: Our flagship programme is a song writing and video producing workshop. Participants write a song that conveys a message that they want to get out to the world. They also create a video project that speaks to the same theme. Sometimes we do that with a cultural and religious emerging component, where we are bringing together, for example, Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in Israel and in the States bringing Jewish, Christian and Muslim students to work together in this programme. Sometimes there is no emerging component and it's just done as a way to amplify a voice.

Paul: You have been in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, what have you been doing?

Todd: The first two weeks we were touring throughout the West Bank doing this programme that I have just described. We were working with a number of different centres. These are two day programmes. Most of the participants we are working with are college age, although some groups are a little bit younger. We are working with them to write a song that really amplifies their message to the world. Many of the people we work with feel like their voices aren't being heard and this is an opportunity to put their voice out there and then create a video project that would speak to the same theme as the song they are writing.

Paul: How do they respond to that?

Todd: Gratitude is the word that comes to mind. First we administer surveys at the beginning of each programme and they answer questions like: Do you feel like you have a voice in the world? Do you feel like the world knows about your community? Do people know about the Palestinian struggle? Across the board the answers were no, they felt like they weren't being heard and that they didn't have a voice. Then we asked them what they wanted the world to know about them. The gratitude was really a huge part of it; gratitude for this opportunity. Across the board, each group that we worked with, took what they were doing very seriously. They recognised that this was an opportunity to say something that hasn't been said.

Paul: After meeting them, did you realise that there was a lot of hopelessness because of the problems they face?