Old Town School Of Folk Is All About Community
Dennis Newman
March 11th, 2008
Melissa Mallinson radiates with pride when I ask what sets Lincoln Square’s Old Town School of Folk Music apart from other schools. “Well, it’s all about bringing people together to celebrate all the different art forms that are present within the city”. Though the Volunteer and Outreach Manager’s first breathlessly-worded sentence sums up the school’s mission, Mallinson has much more to add. She stresses the value of a diverse multicultural experience in the arts, and how Old Town does its best to impart that to as many people as they can.
This sense strong sense of community is immediately evident when walks through the doors of Old Town’s newer location: from the modern-art murals to the handwritten concert calendar on the wall, there’s an air of friend comfort here at Old Town. It is this location that serves as the school’s “home base”, in the 43,000 square-foot space that previously housed the Hild Library. The building was donated to them City of Chicago in September of 1998 in recognition of their dedication to servicing and celebrating Chicago’s broad diversity.
The schools sponsors and provides an enriching artistic experience in innumerable forms. Of these, the most immediate is its academic programs. Besides having lessons in more traditional forms of musical expression like guitar and piano, Old Town School of Folk Music also has instructional courses on whistling, tap-dancing, African Folk music, and a wide variety of other subjects, for both adults and children. Between its main Lincoln Avenue facility and its older branch on Armitage Avenue in Lincoln Park, the school provides lessons for its 6,600 students forty-eight weeks out of the year, making it the largest community-run indepedent arts school in the country. They have been able to forge communities within their students and staff, says Director of Education and Programs Robert Tenges over e-mail, and their educational offerings have helped them reach out to a wider array of audiences.
It’s not just the teaching that makes the school what it is, though. “It’s the way we bring the experience, the love of music, to people both in here at the school, and out there in their lives”, says Community Projects Director Mateo Mulcahy. Being able to share this experience with his community is something that’s very important to Mulcahy, who came to Old Town just recently after having owned a nightclub in St. Louis since 1999. “Chicago is largely a city of people who immigrated here, so it’s great to have a place that celebrates their music, and everyone can come out and enjoy it in such a warm atmosphere.” One of Mulcahy’s main duties is to organize the School’s weekly free in-house shows that showcase traditional forms of World music from Bulgarian to Sub-Saharan African. These shows are incredibly popular, often drawing capacity crowds to Old Town’s four hundred seat auditorium.
While Old Town School of Folk Music is renowned for the positive things it does within its own doors, their community outreach program is where they really shine. They have a program in which a group of their students go to University of Chicago Hospital and play their tunes for some of the younger patients. “We’re definitely looking to expand that”, Mallinson says, “we’re applying for grants so we can go to more nursing homes and hospices.”
One of the best things the School does for its community is also one of its least-publicized endeavors. A number of the faculty members have residencies at Chicago public schools, and they go in once a week to teach youngsters. They have tap-dancing, beat poetry, Latin percussion, and songwriting “workshops”. To Mallinson, this is an outstanding way for Old Town to help out its community: It’s expensive for schools to have full-time music teachers on staff With our grant funding, we’re in a position to bring that experience to the schools, and that’s incredibly valuable.”
Being a non-profit organization, Old Town must rely on grants and donations from its generous patrons. It’s clear that there are a great many people that value Old Town’s impact on the community, as many of their patrons have been involved in the School in some form or another for multiple generations. In addition monetary assistance, many people volunteer their time to help the school: in fact, they take on roughly four hundred volunteers annually. Mallinson, “our volunteers help us with anything from administrative duties to ushering at concerts, and their desire to give back makes our community run much smoother”. To show their appreciation, the school offers a sort of work-study program that allows their volunteers to earn points each time they volunteer, and these points can be applied toward payment for future lessons at the school. This sort of win-win system ensures that the school will be kept running smoothly while those in their community continue to value the School’s social contributions.
See Old Town's Volunteer application here.
Old Town's Promotional Video:
Additional Media Elements:
Video footage from World Music performances, open mics, in-school sessions.
