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Listen
for Life Newsletter - Volume 1
September, 2011
From the Desk of the Executive Director Hi, Andy here - In our first edition of a Listen for Life newsletter I will attempt to give a brief report and overview of some of our activities during 2011. Additional information on any topic can always be found on our updated website at www.listenforlife.org. Our main goal in 2011 has been to raise awareness of Listen for Life and its mission (marketing speak is "building the brand"), so that those in need of our worthwhile projects, programs or productions will know that we exist and can make a difference in their lives. Meanwhile, of course, we have continued to create events and/or maintain the ongoing projects themselves. Building the Brand: Conferences: Specifically in order to raise awareness of Listen for Life and its mission, Donna and I have invested our time and resources to attend/speak at conferences throughout the USA while learning more about publicity, marketing, and product sales/distribution - conference topics included both guerilla and more mainstream methods of PR, the authoring of books, fund raising for nonprofits, using social media, and increasing one's profile as a potential guest on radio/TV talk shows. Our goal now is to put into practice what we have learned. Website and Social Media developments: Please visit our Website at www.listenforlife.org! Check in often, to keep up on what we are doing and learn of upcoming music events in your neighborhood - as noted, if we don't have any scheduled, we welcome you to start one, and we will help you with each step! To celebrate our 13th Anniversary (Donna founded Listen for Life in London, UK in 1998) we launched a new music video channel on YouTube featuring many different music genres. Please feel free to view, join, and "like" any of the videos you see. Listen for Life has expanded its Facebook presence, and we invite you to follow us (and like us, please!) there also. Our Twitter feed provides another way for you to stay abreast of what is happening with us. Donna is trying to get in the habit (slowly) of sending Tweets from around the world while on her music, meeting and speaking engagements. Please also check out the Listen for Life blog, and if any of you have a blog or read others' blogs, please let those blog writers/readers know about ours as well. We really want to hear from as many music listeners as possible and Donna is also currently collecting stories for her upcoming book "Change Your Music, Change Your Life". Publicity: In April of this year Donna was chosen to participate in the National Publicity Summit in New York where she met and spoke with over 110 major radio and television producers/journalists. She astounded the organizers by using her amazing ability to charm anyone and get them excited about Listen for Life's message about the power and impact of music - she secured a (very rare, apparently) 75-80% immediate booking rate for all of their shows and has since been appearing on talk shows around the country, sometimes doing up to 2 interviews per day! Millions of people have now heard of Listen for Life and our programs, who even a month or two ago were unaware of our existence. Our blog and Website will keep you up to date on where and when she will be appearing next! Book: Donna is in the process of completing a book titled "Change your Music, Change your Life" which should be coming out hopefully by end of this year or early 2012 at the latest. Donna has had 6 major publishers and 3 different NY literary agents all fighting over the rights to this book so that is exciting - but publishers all tend to take longer to get a book out on the shelves and then they own the rights, so others have been advising us to self-publish the first edition ourselves and get it out there quicker. In any case, you can pre-order the book on our Website! Products: We are adding significantly to the Listen for Life products available. As Donna has mentioned in her speaking engagements, we need to provide most alternatives to the non-inspiring, non-positive messages that are sent through so many mainstream music-media  outlets at present. Our Listen
for Life production, Travels
with Music (TWM) Series One,
is an
interactive exploration of the world's music masters, offering 4
interactive games that integrate 300 music videos of the instruments
and voices from 15 cultures - you can order a DVD-Rom online,
but we are now also offering an online subscription version
of the program, as well as a new
educational version of the content for
schools/teachers to use, called passportM.
As soon as we can raise the necessary funds through individual donations, grants or corporate sponsorships we have plans (and already-archived content) to release Series 2, 3, and 4 of TWM which will bring you to another 45 or so cultures/countries through the one passport of music! Donna's book will be sold from our Website as well, and all proceeds from those book sales are to benefit Listen for Life projects. Meanwhile, we have recently been approached by several other excellent and relevant products, organizations and/or brands, offering us affiliate marketing partnerships. This coming month we will be starting to add some of those other products as click-through banners on our Website, because we feel that all of these will enhance our mission to restore music as a unifying force throughout the world. If you know of a particular product or organization that you feel would be an excellent and meaningful match for Listen for Life and its mission, please introduce us and/or invite them to contact webmaster@listenforlife.org. Speaking: As the final item in this "Building the Brand" section, I should mention that both Donna and I will always continue to seek speaking engagements to educate, raise awareness and publicize Listen for Life and its message. If you belong to any type of organization that invites speakers (i.e. Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, Women's Groups, Commonwealth Clubs, Toastmasters Clubs, colleges, speakers series, PTAs, etc) and you feel they would be interested to hear about "toxic music" for example (there is a lot more of it than you might think), please contact Listen for Life at info@listenforlife.org. Projects and Programs: 
Notes
for Nourishment: This
project
was founded under the
Listen for
Life umbrella by violist Erin Nolan to provide
"great
music
for a great cause" (her Blog is at www.notesfornourishment.org).
So far
this year Erin, Donna and other musicians have performed Notes for
Nourishment concerts throughout Virginia, Maryland, California, Hawaii,
and Missouri, sometimes on several repeat visits to those locations.
These donated performances have raised significant funds for a wide
range of causes, from covering medical expenses for a young boy with
leukemia, to helping restock food banks facing financial hardship, to
creating programs for impoverished or homeless elderly…..these concerts
have been extremely successful musically as well, because audiences
have treasured the opportunity to not only help "feed" the needy but to
"be fed" themselves, spiritually and emotionally, through  the
experience of live music and in hearing pieces or instruments they
might not have encountered before. Erin is constantly seeking excellent
musicians of any instrumental genre who feel inspired to donate
performances for a cause, to organize a "Notes for Nourishment" concert
in your own community, so if you know anyone please urge them to get in
touch with her!  Peace
Day. The United Nations has set
aside September 21st each year as International
Day of Peace. Many nations
celebrate it, but relatively little is done in the United States.
UN-related organizations in Geneva asked Listen for Life to
create
music events to
raise awareness of Peace Day, and in 2010 Listen for Life
musicians
performed for
Peace Day events in Croatia, Bosnia, UK, and California  where we
organized 120 musicians performing for free in 7 events throughout the
city of Oakland. This year, amongst other locations, we will
produce
our second annual Peace Day celebration in
Oakland CA at Preservation
Park on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. The
free
multicultural concert will feature a number of renowned Listen for Life
musicians
and it is open to the public - we hope to see you there, and if you are
based in the Bay Area please spread the word!Listen for Life Internships, Volunteer Teams, and new Chapters: 
For a few years now,
our Listen for
Life
headquarters in the Bay Area has been delighted to host volunteers of
all ages and demographics, and created official internship or community
service partnerships with
local colleges, high schools and
universities. This summer we were very fortunate to have a fulltime
intern from China, Bolei Yin (interviewed here by Donna), and
she is now continuing to work for us
from her university base in New York.Meanwhile, on our speaking/performance trips to Hawaii and Colorado/Wyoming in recent months, Donna has worked with interested volunteers to begin setting up Listen for Life chapters in Honolulu and in Denver. We can provide templates for each Listen for Life project and/or work online together with interested volunteers in any community to help you create new projects that address specific needs or issues in your own region. Get in touch with us! Later this month, Listen for Life members Donna Stoering, Erin Nolan and Stephen Sutton will be surveying a potential new location in Vermont for offices, festival/concerts, and a retreat center for musicians. Carnegie Hall and related events: Listen for Life is producing a major cross-cultural benefit concert in Carnegie Hall (New York) on Sunday, January 8, 2012 at 8pm. If you are in the area, mark your calendars and book your tickets at the Carnegie Hall website as soon as possible, and come celebrate a new year of special, enriching music with us! Listen for Life is producing 16 events nationwide between now and the Carnegie Hall concert, and some of those are fundraisers to specifically help us recoup the high expenses of the NY event. Some are private dinner-concerts in elegant homes, some are in major venues. Check our website and blog for the latest news on recent or upcoming events! Corporate sponsors: To take even greater advantage of the Carnegie Hall event and other upcoming opportunities that we will tell you about in our next newsletter, Donna is now focused on our search for a corporate sponsor (or two, or three) for Listen for Life, ideally in an annual contract basis. We have been told that many companies, brands and corporations are currently looking for a chance to redeem their public image by being identified with a global non-profit that is "doing good", or changing the world - so if you know anyone working at one of those companies, whom we could contact, please let Donna know! Donations, and Closing: We promise that subsequent newsletters will be much shorter than this first one, but I felt the need to update you on a wide array of topics and activities in this first edition. And while this newsletter has been primarily about what we have recently accomplished or are currently doing, I would be very remiss if I did not mention that what we do costs money. For the past 4 years our small (unpaid) staff have volunteered many hours a day to raise awareness of Listen for Life and its message about the need for enriching music to transform lives, and we have thus far impacted over 9 million people with our programs, outreach projects and productions, all funded internally and through donations. If you like what we are doing and what we stand for, please spread the word to others and consider making a donation to Listen for Life, either through the Donate Now button on our Website or directly through PayPal (or email us at donations@listenforlife.org). Warmest thanks to each of you for being a part of our musical family in our journey, increasing the power of music to renew the world…..please don't forget to keep in touch with us, and happy Music Listening! Andy (Robert) Anderson Executive Director, Listen for Life Email: aanderson@listenforlife.org USA headquarters: 1201 Martin Luther King Jr Way, Suite 104, Oakland CA 94612 tel (510) 540 8136
“…..what
have you
heard today?”
Exciting update: At a recent conference Donna was at a table with the longtime producer of Oprah, renowned media expert and author Michelle Anton. She was impressed with the message that Donna shared and promised to check out the Listen for Life Website after she returned home. The very next day Donna received an email note with the totally unsolicited "testimonial" below:
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