Music uses melodic sounds to express emotion and spread harmony. The Peace Music Foundation is a student-created group that performs various musical pieces for the Pleasanton community. Their most common audience consists of Pleasanton’s senior citizens.
“The main mission is to bring joy and live music to senior centers, because I believe that they’re kind of an isolated part of society, and they don’t really get to see a lot of live music. It’s really nice to be able to give them a special experience,” said Peace Music Foundation President Yuna Kang (‘27).
The Foundation
The non-profit is entirely volunteer based. The first steps of forming the foundation include creating an officer team and assembling members. All members have musical experience with instruments ranging from the piano to the flute.
“It started out pretty simple, with me contacting a few of my friends, and then we also reached out to more people for recruitment later on. Then we found time to practice and after that, we started reaching out to different senior centers to schedule our first performance,” said Kang.
The foundation visits a variety of centers and venues such as Sunol Creek Memory, Sunrise Senior Living, Stoneridge Creek, and the PPIE Gala. The pieces they play vary depending on the players and their instruments.
“We go to the senior center with the volunteers we already organized. There is an audience of seniors because the center advertises the performance with flyers. The seniors all go into the lobby and then we go there, and we perform,” said Peace Music Foundation Technology Officer Anvita Nattuva (‘27).
Bringing Smiles
While gaining more performance experience, members are also making an impact on the Pleasanton community. Senior centers are always looking for more activities and events to engage their residents.
“I hope it has made a lot of senior citizens happy because we’ve gone to a lot of centers, and some of them look really sad there, but after we go, we have people come up and tell us ‘oh thank you for performing the performance reminded me of my father or my sister’, and it’s really nice,” said Peace Music Foundation Treasurer Claire Shin (‘28).
Interactions between younger and older generations are beneficial to both sides. Each individual has advice from experiences and has space to grow and learn from others
“A lot of the seniors, they come up to us after and sometimes they give advice. One of them was telling us about how your smile has a great impact on other people. So keep smiling. I feel like I learned a lot from their advice,” said Nattuva.
Music is a language everyone can be appreciative of and understand. The Peace Music Foundation hopes to continue its mission statement of bringing joy across the community through this beautiful art form.
“The main contribution we’ve made to our community is bringing joy to senior centers, because I think they’re really an underrepresented part of society, and it’s really nice to be able to bring happiness to everyone in terms of the community,” said Kang.
