About Music & Resilience
Music & Resilience is an international cooperation project created by Associazione di Promozione Sociale Prima Materia (PM, Italy).
The project was born in 2011 in collaboration with the Palestinian-Lebanese partner National Institution of Social Care and Vocational Training (NISCVT, Lebanon; Arabic name Beit Atfal Assumoud), to support and develop psycho-educational resources to protect the well-being of children and adolescents who are born, live and grow up in traumatic conditions in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.
Since 2024, the project expanded its scope to other contexts, such as Ucraine and other refugee communities.
Music & Resilience promotes music and music therapy as good practices for the prevention of social and cultural deprivation and isolation among refugee and marginalised communities.
An exchange between cultures, populations, people that promotes solidarity and the development of community resources in the refugee camps. The main aim is to use music as a tool to care for, support and rehabilitate the boys and girls of war-affected populations forced to emigrate from their homeland.
This is what has happened, and is still happening, to the Palestinian refugee population who have been living with this condition for over seventy-five years now. A condition that causes several problems in children due to the effects of chronic stress, their difficult refugee status and the intolerable conditions in which they are forced to live and grow up.
We are witnessing these same processes in other contexts where we bring our interventions, such as Ucraine in conflict with Russia, or with migrants from Africa trying to reach Europe. This is all happening now.
Music & Resilience was awarded in 2013 by the International Music Council (founded in 1949 by UNESCO) with the Five music rights award. The “five music rights” advocate the accessibility to musical education and expression for every child and adult in the world.The method employed by Music & Resilience has been developed over time within the team, and is conceived in terms of musical substance, in what it means to be a musician with or without the instrument in one’s hand. We consider music as a matter that is not exclusively relegated to mere performance, but as a way of being in the everyday: an attention to listening, to the tone of voice, to touch and closeness, to the interchange of roles, to the possibility of communicating at several levels and/or languages, in each person’s own time.
Time, dedication and acceptance are three flexible and fundamental cornerstones around which our work revolves, while at the same time allowing for continuous revision and evolution.
We encourage and enhance the expression of individual differences capable of highlighting the uniqueness of each and every one, with a person-centred approach, in the awareness and belief that skills are an additional value and not a commodity to be showcased; an asset when they can be passed on from the individual to the group and vice versa. We are aware that all the different elements of the musical matter are the backbone of a collective work, that each individuality is the seed that contributes to the creation of the whole.
The project is structured along three main lines, all with a musical imprint
These musical interventions have been developed and employed in our work in Lebanon, and are being carried to all the other contexts where we work, such as Ucraine, or the Gazawi families currently refugee in Italy. Each context needs a special adaptation of the working method to suit its specific needs.
