Youth orchestra students produce promo video

Video project is part of new Valley Vibes leadership program|

A new video promoting Sonoma Valley's unique youth orchestra program was produced entirely by students.

Valley Vibes Orchestras is a youth development program of the Sonoma Valley Education Foundation that uses music to help create skilled, community-oriented, and healthy youth and young adults. It is a long-term, high-intensity preventive intervention that invests in young children; expanding access to musical opportunity, empowering youth with individual and group skills and unifying people in common pursuit of artistic, personal and community excellence.

Six of the older Valley Vibes Orchestra students participated in its first Youth Leadership Council this summer. Their project was to create a promo film for ViVO from start to finish. The students did everything from the interviewing, filming and editing to planning and hosting the premier screening for the film.

The sixth grade student producers were Vanessa Carrillo of Altimira Middle School (film team), Yasmin Esper (film team) of Adele Harrison Middle School, Natalia Valdez (film team) of Adele, Kamaya Khounsaknarath (event team) of Orchardview School in Sebastapol, April Sanchez (event team) of Adele and Palak Nagpal (event team) of Adele.

The creation of this film was the first project of ViVO's new Youth Leadership Council. YLC is a project-based group with rotating membership by application for the older students (fifth grade and up) of Valley Vibes. These six girls, under the direction of ViVO Teaching Artist, Debbie Gold, created the entire film from start to finish (interviewing, filming, editing, etc.) and also planned and presented a screening of the film in September at Community Cafe. Future projects include implementing a mentorship program within ViVO and planning the curriculum for (and teaching) a basic musicianship class for adults within our community.

“We're excited to get the word out as much as possible about what this program, and more importantly, our kids, are doing,” said program director Rachel Patrick.

With an orchestra, wind ensemble, choir, percussion, chamber music and alternative styles classes, ViVO is open to students ages 5-13 and there are no financial barriers to participation. “Our door is open to any child who is serious about wanting to learn a musical instrument,” said Patrick. (valleyvibesorchestra.com)

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