May’s Awesome Ottawa award goes to Nieve Xiao to bring young musicians together with seniors through Sound of Life.
“Sound of Life is a group of youth musicians from across Ottawa bringing music and joy into retirement homes. We have more than 50 volunteers and are entirely organized and run by our board of seven high school students,”explains Nieve.
“Our organization brings about intergenerational learning and interaction,” she continues, “fuelling connection across the community. Music has also been shown to have an immense benefit to dementia and other memory related illnesses that come with old age.”
“I am in Grade 11 at Lisgar Collegiate Institute and have volunteered in retirement homes for three years,” she says. “I have had many interactions with people with dementia, or forms of it, and have realized the need for adaptive therapies to aid them in their wellbeing. As an avid musician and two-time provincial finalist in piano, I decided to bring two aspects of my life together to found Sound of Life.”
Nieve and the team plan to use the award to build homemade instruments to give to residents so they can play along during performances.
Awesome Ottawa is part of a global movement of self-organizing chapters forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time. At each chapter, ten or so “trustees” each contribute $100 every month, and review short applications received online to decide on the recipient of the pooled funds — usually a local project, but occasionally a particularly awesome one far away from home. Globally, more than $7 million has already been awarded – $191,000 of that by Awesome Ottawa.
For more information, visit awesomeottawa.ca.
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