Miami Proud: Making early music education accessible to all children is Dr. Joy’s mission

MIAMI – Music is one of the highly effective instruments in education and baby growth.

Making early music education accessible to all children throughout the boundaries of monetary and bodily challenges is the mission of musician, researcher, and former elementary college trainer Joy Galliford. 

She’s generally known as merely ‘Doctor Joy”. 

She pours all her experience and energy into her nonprofit Friends of South Florida Music. 

Her program is in schools all over Miami-Dade, serving underserved children, called Music FUNdamentals, with the emphasis on “enjoyable” express. 

“We provide free weekly music education classes to children of all abilities currently year-round in 2016 we started with 97 children and now we are over 800 who receive this same class every week,” Joy Galliford, Ph.D., govt director.

In a classroom of particular wants children at Promised Land Academy in Homestead, she is clearly beloved by her college students. 

She leads them in track, will get them transferring, will get down on the ground, jumps up and down, shakes rattles, and rolls with them too. The optimistic vitality is palpable, the educational is a bit extra delicate.

“Music is a natural way for children to stimulate gross motor, fine motor, cognitive language, and self-help skills without them ever noticing that they’re doing that. My goal is to try to have every child have this opportunity.”

Her story begins with a musical childhood in West Virginia.

“My family sang every Sunday night together,” she added that her first music expertise was within the womb, as her mom performed piano.

“I started at the age of 13 teaching piano lessons in my hometown because there was not a piano teacher there, I also became a choir director in a local church.”

She got here to Miami for faculty and graduated from the University of Miami. 

She went from trainer to Hurricane Andrew reduction employee as a missionary and was recruited to battle an enormous downside dealing with Little Havana’s susceptible youngsters in a program with then Dade County Commission.

“I worked to keep children off the streets – kids who were being asked to be in gangs at a third and fourth-grade level,” she recalled, including that her moniker was ‘the gringo on eighth road.’  “I loved every minute of that work.”

Tara Collado has identified Galliford for practically ten years.

She has been a music teacher for Friends of SF Music for 3 of those years and loves the interplay with college students of all skills. 

“When you see a student who may not be verbal, that they are participating and engaging and doing all the things that we ask then to do – you see how powerful this program is,” mentioned Collado.

“For me, she’s (Galliford) been a mentor and a guide.”

Both of Collado’s daughters are college students at Doctor Joy’s non-public music college, South Florida Music.

Many of those college students which have identified Galliford their entire lives turn out to be mentors and volunteers and carry out in live performance fundraisers that gasoline the nonprofit.

It is a particular connection certainly.

“When I take a child into my home for private lessons, I am making a decision to invest in personal level in them,” Galliford mentioned.

“They write college essays about this organization and how music has made a difference in their lives.”

CBS4 meteorologist Lissette Gonzalez served as emcee for the latest live performance for the nonprofit, her daughter is additionally considered one of Dr. Joy’s college students, and carried out within the recital. 

The accolades for Friends of South Florida Music and Galliford embody the 2021 Non-Profit Honoree for Women’s Chamber of Commerce of Miami-Dade, and 2022 nominee for The Children’s Trust Champion for Children Award, and a 2022 Florida Coalition for Children Champion Award as properly.