About the Partners

The WMPI Steering Committee and affiliated organizations are committed to enhancing the diversity of the Baltimore and Washington D.C. region’s classical music community, recognizing that by providing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive learning environment for our students, we are preparing them for personal and professional success in an increasingly global society. The WMPI community recognizes that it has a responsibility for creating and sustaining a learning environment where difference is valued, and where equity and inclusion are practiced.

  • Hailed as a national model for diversity in music education, the DC Youth Orchestra Program’s mission is to empower young people to transform their lives through music and community. An award-winning non-profit organization that annually serves over 600 youth from across the Washington metropolitan region, DCYOP has received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award and plays a key advocacy role for music education in the nation’s capital. The organization is proud to unite students with different identities from 250 different schools and 100 different zip codes with a shared passion.

  • The Kennedy Center is the nation’s performing arts center and living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Located on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., the Center presents more than 2,000 performances each year across all genres, and is also home to artistic affiliates Washington National Opera and National Symphony Orchestra. The Center reaches millions of students, teachers, and families each year through its local and national school and community partnerships, as well as performances and experiences for young audiences. In 2019, the REACH—the first expansion in the Center’s 50-year history—opened to the community, creating a 21st century arts campus which promotes both formal and informal artistic interactions, and ensures all visitors to the Center can have meaningful artistic interactions, whether on stage or behind the scenes.

  • Levine Music logo

    Levine Music is a welcoming community where children and adults find lifelong inspiration and joy through learning, performing, listening to, and participating with others in music. Levine’s core values – excellence and opportunity – infuse everything we do. Our distinguished faculty offers a broad and well-rounded curriculum that provides a strong musical foundation for students of different ages, abilities, and interests. We strive to make Levine’s education available to everyone. Hundreds of students receive substantial scholarship assistance; many hundreds more receive free instruction through fully funded in-school programs.

  • Founded in 1931, the National Symphony Orchestra has demonstrated its firm commitment to artistic excellence and music education through a wide range of programs that reach audiences across the country and around the world. In addition to performing approximately 150 concerts of innovative programming each season, the NSO conducts an extensive education program, including career development opportunities for young musicians, as well as nationally recognized community engagement projects such as NSO In Your Neighborhood and the Kennedy Center’s Sound Health partnership with Renee Fleming and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 1986, the National Symphony became an artistic affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where it has performed a full season of subscription concerts since the Center opened in 1971.

WMPI is part of a larger program with the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, funded by the Mellon Foundation's "Pathways" program with a $3 million grant. The initiative is championing a collective approach to creating a more inclusive American classical music community in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Other Pathways programs can be found in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and several other cities.

 Through comprehensive excellent education, the Peabody Institute nurtures talent and creativity; provides aspiring musicians with the skills to sustain professional careers; fosters lifelong involvement in music and dance; and prepares students in artistic performance at the highest level, providing inspiration and enlightenment to regional, national and international communities.

The Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.