Alive Inside CommUniversity
What if the kids brought the music?
Put a hundred students in an eldercare center with the right songs and everybody in the building changes.
What it is
From one film to a program
Alive Inside showed what music, relationship and plain empathy can do at the end of a life. Millions of caregivers now give memory music to elders living with Alzheimer's and other dementias.
Then came the question underneath it. What if the kids were the ones handing it over? That is CommUniversity: the eldercare center treated as a classroom, and the elders in it treated as the teachers.
It was going to be the subject of a second film, Alive Inside Too!, which is a third shot and waiting.
What happened
Everybody in the room changed
Teachers
Found freedom
An elder is a better history lesson than a textbook, and the teachers found room to teach in ways no curriculum had given them.
Students
Found purpose
They were not ticking off service hours. They watched somebody come back to life in front of them and knew they had done it.
The center
Bloomed
Financially and emotionally. A care home turned into somewhere the whole town chose to walk into, month after month.
13
Schools, up from one
200–400
Students a month in the center
One third
Of the second film shot
How it went
Healdsburg, California
The pilot
One private school
Tony Fisher started with a single school, walking students into an eldercare center to give residents their own music back.
Growth
Thirteen schools
It spread to thirteen schools and 200 to 400 students a month. Nobody who spent time in that building came out of it unchanged.
The second film
Alive Inside Too!
Michael and Tony started filming what was happening, convinced it could do for schools and eldercare what the first film did for dementia.
2020
Covid closed the doors
A third of it was shot. Five years of getting young people and elders into the same room became unthinkable overnight, and it has been waiting ever since.
Now
A team, ready
We have people ready to start again. If you run a school, a center, or just want to be useful, get in touch.
Watch
See it in the room
What it actually looks like when students and elders share music together. It is not subtle.
Bring it to your school
Tell us what you have — a classroom, a care home, an afternoon a month — and we will help you start.
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