Favela Brass is a registered Brazilian Non-profit Association.
CNPJ: 37.332.605/0001-9
Favela Brass is a registered Brazilian Non-profit Association.
CNPJ: 37.332.605/0001-9
Since its founding, Favela Brass has relied heavily on a steady stream of both local and international volunteers to fulfill its mission of providing free musical instruction and performance opportunities to at-risk children.
Volunteers regularly offer crucial support at our performance and fundraising events—with tasks that include taking photos, filming and editing videos, selling Favela Brass t-shirts, serving snacks, and helping us transport musical equipment.
Favela Brass is also grateful to our volunteer music teachers who have assisted us from day one. By providing individualized lessons on a range of instruments (namely trumpet, saxophone, trombone, and percussion), these volunteers have been vital in helping our students progress as musicians. They have come from both Brazil and abroad—including the US, UK, Iceland, and France—and several have lived with us (at Tom’s house) in the Pereira da Silva favela.
Interested in helping out?
When Favela Brass was founded, the generosity of director Tom Ashe’s friends in the Doncaster (UK) community, who donated numerous used brass and woodwind instruments, was essential in helping the project get off the ground. Since then, Favela Brass has been fortunate to have received instrument donations from individuals and organizations in Rio and around the world.
The primary instruments that Favela Brass students play and that we can always put to good use are the trumpet, trombone, saxophone, clarinet, melodica, recorder, and snare drum.
As Favela Brass continues to grow and enroll new students, we are in constant need of new or used instruments to ensure that all of our students are well equipped to succeed. Many of our beginner students who are currently playing the melodica will progress to playing a brass or woodwind instrument in about a year’s time and at this moment we cannot guarantee that all of them will have access to a reliable instrument.
Interested in helping out?
Beyond individual monthly donations, Favela Brass has been greatly supported by fundraising efforts led by friends and supporters of the project.
One noteworthy example of such an effort was the “Coast to Coast Stomp,” which was organized in the UK by trombonist Stuart Garside. Over the course of ten days in August 2015, eight British jazz musicians walked from the West Coast to the East Coast of the UK, raising money through sponsorship and busking in each of the towns they went through to perform on their journey. In the end, over £4,000 was raised and this feat was repeated in 2016.
Since 2017 the Lycée Molière, a French school located near the entrance to our favela in the Laranjeiras district, has held an annual student fun-run which has consistently raised over R$8,000 for the project as well as giving our students a chance to perform for the schools’ parents and students.
We’d also like to thank acclaimed US-based DJ Seth Troxler, who discovered our work during the COVID-19 pandemic and held a live-streamed performance in June 2020 to raise funds for the project. More than R$3,000 was raised from this effort.
Interested in helping out?
Monthly donations are essential to the success and sustainability of Favela Brass, as having a reliable stream of funding allows us to budget effectively and ultimately maintain a high quality of instruction for our students on a long-term basis. We are grateful for the support we’ve had from monthly donors who have helped make the project viable since its inception.
Hiring new staff (such as a professional music teacher, administrative coordinator, or a part-time accountant) and covering other recurring expenses (such as transportation, meals for the kids after rehearsals, and instrument and equipment maintenance) are examples of the kinds of actions monthly donations make possible.
Monthly donations have been essential in keeping our beloved percussion teacher Manguerinha, a highly experienced musician from Rio’s Vila Isabel Samba School, at the project since 2014.
Monthly donors receive access to our newsletter with exclusive content and we are always delighted to receive donors who want to visit our home in the Pereira da Silva community and meet the children.
On our Patreon page, you’ll find more information on what becoming a monthly donor to Favela Brass entails and how your donation can help us transform the lives of Brazilian children through music.
At Favela Brass, we always welcome the possibility of partnering with educational institutions, musical groups or performance artists, and other organizations to conduct exchanges with our students. We are proud to share with you here several examples of previous exchanges that were a resounding success:
During Carnival 2020, the New York Brass Band from England visited the project (for the second time) and performed across Rio. The band brought 17 wind instruments to donate, raised more than R$ 6,000 for us with charity performances before arrival, and–soon after touching down in Rio–made presentations at five public schools to encourage registration for Favela Brass workshops. Below is a video from this exchange, in which our saxophone student Andre is trading choruses on a solo with Stuart McDonald of the New York Brass Band.
In November 2015, the internationally acclaimed Tokyo SKA Paradise Orchestra from Japan visited the project and performed with the children at the local ABCD restaurant in addition to donating instruments and giving a music workshop. The event was such a success that, when the band returned to Brazil the following year, Favela Brass opened the show for them at Vivo Rio during the 2016 Olympics.
In May 2015, our students came together with a choir from The British School of Rio de Janeiro to play the British national anthem at the Queen’s birthday celebration party hosted by the British Consulate-general in Rio de Janeiro. Our students have since performed numerous concerts alongside children from the British school at end-of-term events and Christmas concerts, and also joint percussion workshops, run by our director of percussion, Mangueirinha.
Interested in helping out?
Bindu Mathur was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada and worked for 10 years in London as a TV producer/director, making science and history documentaries for the BBC, Discovery and Channel 4. She also made videos for international NGOs and has filmed in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America. Resident in Rio de Janeiro since 2007 she is the owner of the award-winning Casa Beleza B&B in Santa Teresa, where she lives with her husband and two children. She is a long-time collaborator with Favela Brass including making films for the project. Her children also studied at the project.