Program: Multicultural Music Group Inc., New York, NY Contact(s): Luis Mojica, Executive Director: (914) 375-4096 Purpose: To promote multicultural arts instruction as a tool to achieve global understanding, cultural awareness, and academic improvement Background Program Operations Outcomes Background The Multicultural Music Group Inc. (MMG) is a nonprofit organization created in 1996 to incorporate multicultural instruction in classrooms. As a result of the absence of multicultural topics in the teachers' training curricula for arts education, MMG has been adopted by several schools and community school districts in New York City. Program Operations Through its programs, MMG strives to increase students' arts and academic proficiency in the New York City public schools, as well as to increase the amount of teacher training programs in multicultural instruction. The program also seeks to heighten the aesthetic sensitivity for multicultural arts and decrease the racial tensions among ethnic groups in New York City schools and their surrounding communities. Through the Teacher Training Program, the MMG contacts schools in multiethnic communities and provides a summer institute in multicultural student education for their music teachers. The teaching approach reinforced through another program, the Integrated Arts Component, presents the arts as a vehicle to illuminate concepts from other disciplines such as language, grammar, reading and phonics. This program strives to use multicultural artistic concepts to enhance the academic achievement of students from kindergarten-12th grade. The Residence Program presents the opportunity for musicians from different cultures to work with educational institutions as artists in residence who teach music educators and their students how to create and perform the music of their expertise. Outcomes and Significant Accomplishments During the past three years, the MMG has annually supported an average of 25 music educators and their approximately 600 respective students to develop multicultural repertoires and with the cooperation of artists from the Residence Program. Through the work of MMG, two schools in New York were removed from a list of schools under review for having low-reading levels. This accomplishment helped the MMG expand the Integrated Arts Component to other schools and districts in New York City.