CULTURAL PRESERVATION
Around the world, much of our programming is rooted in the traditional cultures respective to each location. Across Africa for example, we engage hundreds of traditional musicians and dancers to engage thousands of community members across more than 20 locations. In Morocco and Uganda, more than 250 traditional musicians are engaged throughout the year to transmit traditional heritages to local youth and earn economic opportunity to perform in front of their communities at large. In Mali and Rwanda, traditional dance classes see groups of almost 100 youth per class. In Ghana, traditional Dagomba culture is practiced by children as young as eight years old. And in South Africa, traditional Xhosa culture is used to foster a positive sense of identity among neighborhoods outside of Cape Town who still suffer from lingering effects of Apartheid.
FOOD SECURITY
In the Bidibidi Refugee Settlement in northern Uganda, need food rations among the South Sudanese population was cut by the World Food Program in late 2023, dramatically increasing an already stressful food security situation inside the refugee settlement. Increased cases of suicide were reported at the time and people even returned back into the South Sudan, where a brutal civil conflict still persists. PFCF and local partner Sina Loketa ramped up an agricultural project we created in 2021 to train more than 200 refugees to farm as a collective on several large farm plots across the refugee settlement, immediately growing several tons of food to feed almost 1000 vulnerable refugees before the end of 2023. This project has grown through 2024, and we’re looking to scale to feed ten thousands people by the end of 2025 with your support!
Refugee Crises
In the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, nearly 80,000 Syrian refugees dwell in harsh living conditions, while also still suffering from traumatic effects of having to civil war and violence stemming from the rise of ISIS in Syria. More than 20,000 of the population has been born within the refugee camp and know Zaatari as their only home. The Zaatari Music Program, the only music program available to youth in all of Zaatari, has grown by 200% in its inaugural year as there was an overwhelming response to a positive, structured space for joy and creativity. We created the Dream Day Studio, inaugurated by superstar Ellie Goulding, that has produced several hundred songs so far in its initial iteration. Our goal is to expand the studio to host large group performances and international residencies.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Advancing sand dunes in the Sahara Desert of Morocco are swallowing large sections of villages outside the town of M’hamid El Ghizlane, where PFCF program Joudour Sahara operates. This phenomenon has created thousands of ‘climate refugees’, and nearly 35% of the entire population has immigrated out of M’hamid into other parts of Morocco sine the 1980s. This migration has meant that ancestral cultural heritages belonging to tribes who have resided in these villages for centuries, and some more millennia, are dying and some traditional knowledge has already been lost forever. Our solution is to approach cultural and environmental preservation as the same challenge.
We engage traditional musicians, who are also farmers vital to the maintenance of the local ecological ecosystem, across more than 14 rural communities to transmit cultural heritages to their youth and also implement widescale environmental programming, tree plantings, and community awareness campaigns around positive environmental practices. The Joudour Sahara Center for Music and Ecology, an award winning, zero-cement cultural campus, is currently being constructed and is set to be a first-of-its-kind cultural facility not just in Morocco, but neighboring Saharan countries Algeria, Mauritania, and Mali.
GANG VIOLENCE
One of our newest programs, developed in partnership with Glasswing International, operates among the most violent neighborhoods in Guatemala City, uses afterschool glee clubs to engage youth across six schools in these neighborhoods. We hope to break cycles of violence where teenagers are either victims of gang violence, or recruited into gangs, through the development of this afterschool programming and a broader sense of community pride in their youth.
POVERTY
Poverty persists as one of the most pressing issues PFCF faces in nearly all of the communities we serve. Across many countries, youth drop out of school to enter the workforce as teenagers to bring in income for their families. Outside of Cape Town, South Africa, many of our children suffer from food insecurity within their households. The Pine Ridge Reservation in the United States, the median household income is half of the national average, and more than 50% live below the poverty line. In Tintale, Nepal, the average household income brings in less than $400 over the course of the entire year. From bringing children into safe, structured spaces to learn new skills, to implementing nutrition programs in several countries and providing economic opportunities to underemployed cultural actors locally, poverty is one of the biggest challenges our communities face worldwide.
CHILD MARRIAGE
In Nepal, a foundational pillar of our work among several programs in the rural region of Udayapur is to give children opportunities to define their own futures. Among remote and very conservative communities we engage, child marriage remains a serious issue that persists from customs practiced centuries ago. The Tintale Village Mother’s Society implements outreach programs to talk to thousands of community members within dozens of these remote communities to speak on the importance of keeping girls in school. The Tintale Education Foundation (TEF) was established as a primary school, and now as a secondary school, to provide such educational opportunities to now more than 350 youth from such rural communities. The passages from elementary school to middle school, and then from middle school to high school, sit as danger passages for girls across this region who get pulled out of school at the ages of 11 or 14 to work within the household and live at heavy risk of child marriage. TEF boasts a 100% graduation rate for these grades and keeps girls in school to continue their education into late adolescence.
INDIGENOUS RIGHTS
PFCF collaborates and supports indigenous communities across three continents, promoting language revitalization, cultural preservation, and economic empowerment. Across the Patagonia region of Argentina, we work with the Mapuche community to bring Mapuche youth together with musicians and elders at different Mapuche community centers and local across the Neuquén province. The annual winter solstice celebration each July usually brings about 500 Mapuche and non-indigenous groups together as an act to celebrate tradition and build social cohesion among diverse cultural and ethnic communities who live in the region.
EMERGENCY RESPONSE
After the tragic floods in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, nearly 600,000 Brazilians were displaced from their homes, with tens of thousands living in shelters for weeks. Our team on the ground, from PFC Instituto in Curitiba, Brazil, mobilized a massive aid effort that led to more than $3.5 million donated in medicine, emergency aircraft rescue, food and water, the construction of houses, and direct cash contributions for the benefit of more than 100,000 flood victims.
GENDER EQUITY
Gender discrimination is an issue in every country where we work. PFCF has made outsized efforts from community to community to identify and position women as programs leaders, teachers, staff, administrators, and role models and community leaders. Across Africa, from Morocco to Mali to Ghana and Rwanda, we’ve brought hundreds of girls into our music and dance programming and have taken great efforts to create new normals for girls’ participation across these communities. And in rural Nepal, thousands of female hygiene products have been distributed across the Udayapur region to promote period positivity and combat entrenched discrimination girls face as they grow into adolescence.
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Domestic violence is an issue in too mayny communities we serve. From areas as diverse as rural Nepal to urban Guatemala City, violence within the household imprints an enduring trauma on children. Our efforts to address this major challenge range from outreach, legal, and security efforts in Nepal, to creating positive, safe spaces for youth at many of our programs, and fostering environments for families to come together in celebration of their children’s development at our music programs.
SAFE SPACES
In Morocco, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Uganda, PFCF has made major efforts in recent years to build coalitions of partners and invest in major infrastructural projects to transform cultural landscapes across North, West, and East Africa. The Joudour Sahara Cultural Center for Music and Ecology in M’hamid El Ghizlane is currently under construction in Morocco and is a state-of-the-art cultural campus already benefiting musicians from multiple Saharan countries. In Mali, Grammy-winner Damon Albarn (of he Gorillaz) recently contributed to build a music studio and dedicate his own time and equipment to train local community members on music production. The World Monuments Fund is working with PFCF in Sierra Leone to rehabilitate the historic Ole Forah Bay College in Freetown into an afterschool music program and recording studio. The Nina Simone Foundation is supporting the construction of a cultural campus that will redfine cultural opportunities for youth and musicians across northern Ghana. And in partnership with TO.org, the construction of the Bidibidi Music and Arts Center was finished in 2024, a state-of-the-art performing arts center and recording facility for South Sudanese youth and musicians in the Bidibidi Refugee Settlement.
MENTORSHIP
In partnership with the leading Native cultural organization First Peoples Fund, PFCF established the Wicahpi Olowan Music Program & Studio at the Oglala Lakota Artspace on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. PFCF’s first program in North America, we created the only Native-run, professional recording studio on Pine Ridge, where the team of program leaders and sound engineers use mentorship as a tool to develop positive senses of self-worth, self-esteem, and build a greater sense of community among intergenerational artists. This space for mentorship was more needed than ever as the teen suicide rate is 200% the national average. Hundreds of songs and several major albums have been released in just the last 12 months as we’ve seen an explosion of artistic production within a community that was craving such a creative outlet.
CLEAn WATER
The ancient village of Kirina sits about an hour south of Bamako in southern Mali, where Griot traditions have been passed down for more than 75 generations. 3,000 people from the greater Kirina area relied upon wells for clean water, which fell into disrepair in 2023. With support from Grammy-winning artist Damon Albarn, a long-time partner of local PFCF program Ecole de Musique de Kirina, PFCF helped create a water distribution network in the village, building and repair wells that provide clean water access to the community at large, including the local clinic, maternity ward, and public school.
Community Revitalization
10 years ago, the Cajuru neighborhood in Curitiba, Brazil faced daily threats like gang violence stemming from drug trafficking. Over that time, PFCF program PFC Instituto has seen more than 1000 local youth through its doors, helping build a new generation of community members, fostering positive relationships with local families, and changing dynamics across Cajuru. Now, the area where the music program operates is renown as a bright spot within Curitiba, safe for children to come and learn music and dance, and families to gather and celebrate each other during the annual PFC Day event, which brought out 10,000 community members during the 2023 edition.
ETHNIC EQUITY
In the townships outside of Cape Town, South Africa, the effects of Apartheid linger and continue to keep community members from determining their own futures as educational, economic, housing, and social disparities remain stark between White and Black neighborhoods. The Imvula Music Program uses traditional Xhose music and dance customs to promote local cultural identity, and brings more than 125 food-insecure students into a nutrition program so they don’t have to worry about hunger as they have fun in our programming. Annual community events serve to build social cohesion and promote peace through music in neighborhoods where racial discrimination plagues society.