United Sound, an Arizona nonprofit based in Mesa that provides music lessons to special needs students, recently received a $15,000 grant through Arizona Financial Credit Union’s Local Causes Visa program.
The grant will be used for the nonprofit’s peer mentorship program, where special needs high school students are matched up with peer mentors and take individualized classes to learn an instrument. Mentors are trained to work with and interact with special needs students while they teach them an instrument. The students are provided with an opportunity to learn an instrument at a pace that accommodates for their disability.
“A school will reach out to us or we will reach out to them. We’ll help them to set up a United Sound chapter within the entity of their school. The existing music students then become peer mentors,” United Sound Executive Director Julie Duty said. “Once we have those peer mentors identified, we ask the students in the special education department if they would like to play an instrument. They have a choice of all of the instruments, which is a really important first step of authenticity if you play the instrument that you would really like to play, not the instrument that someone else decides is appropriate for your physical or intellectual disability.”
The students are paired with three peer mentors during the instructional period, which not only helps with learning but also provides special needs students who may be overwhelmed by a fully populated classroom with controlled social stimuli.
“There’s always three peer mentors for each new musician. The new musicians are the students with disabilities and that way you have someone to be playing with you, someone to track the music, someone to be hands-on with you,” Duty said. “You have three brand new friends that are people that you might not have interacted with in any way otherwise. United Sound is primarily a social inclusion. We have a social inclusion mission that we are accomplishing through music.”
The funding from the grant will go toward purchasing instruments and musical equipment as well as the nonprofit’s operational costs. This is important not only for instruction but also for the joint performances the students and peer mentors from their respective schools put on.
The grant from Arizona Financial Credit Union was funded by purchases made on members’ Visa debit cards. The grants are given out to locally focused nonprofits that have less than $2 million in operating funds, in order to provide support to local nonprofits that do not have as much outreach as the larger national ones.
The partnership between United Sound and Arizona Financial Credit Union began in late 2023.
“We put out a call to local nonprofits inviting them to apply to our local causes grant program. So that’s how we initially came in contact with United Sound,” David Kexel, communications director at Arizona Financial Credit Union, said.
Duty said that she first saw Arizona Financial’s offer via social media advertisement. She ended up applying as did many other nonprofits. After an internal review from Arizona Financial, the list of applicants was narrowed down to 10.
“We put those 10 nonprofits up for vote on our website and invited community members to vote on which organization to receive the grant and United Sound got the most votes. So they received a $15,000 grant which was our largest donation to date,” Kexel said. “...We did an interview a couple a weeks ago, and I was in a room with some kids playing their instruments. It’s just awesome to see what this money is doing in the community. Even for the mentors, it’s great for them, because they’re able to interact people different from them which builds a sense of compassion.”
Duty said that she hopes the United Sound program can be a pebble that creates a ripple effect that helps reduce the stigma around kids with special needs and also makes special needs kids less afraid of socializing with others who aren’t like them.
“My perspective is that music is one of the most important things we can have in our schools, and it changes kids. It changes their work ethic, it changes who they are fundamentally,” Duty said. “So if we already have the best very thing going on in the music room, then we can include more students in that and give everybody this really awesome opportunity to learn about people that are different from them, we’re checking off these goals one at a time.”
To learn more about United Sound, get involved or make a donation, you can visit www.unitedsound.org.
