Flemingo Foundation partners with ‘The Music Project’

Flemingo Duty Free COO Asia P.K. Thimmayya, Flemingo International Director/Board Member Paul Topping, The Music Project Founder Trustee Shalini Wickramasuriya and Flemingo Duty Free DGM Marketing Nandhini Srinivasan

Flemingo Foundation, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) arm of Flemingo International has signed an agreement to partner with The Music Project as part of its CSR initiatives. 

As part of this, Flemingo will sponsor the music education for the children of Lakdas De Mel College, Kurunegla for the period of April 2016 to March 2017. The sponsorship includes their weekly classes, holiday programmes, festival programmes, competition as well as the biannual UNITE orchestra residential workshop where the music project children from all schools come together. 

The Music Project is inspired by El Sistema (a publicly-financed voluntary sector music education programme in Venezuela) and aims to foster a sense of musical achievement on an individual and personal level by providing those whose lives might have been affected by poverty, war or abuse, a therapeutic and holistic opportunity to excel and fulfil their own potential within a thriving musical community. 

The project aims to provide links between the children of the north and south using music as the link language and to ensure long-term ties. As the programme progresses, the two orchestral communities from the north and south, work together to perform and participate in workshops that would involve instrumentalists and specialists. This end result would ensure that the kids of two diverse communities establish links through music, thereby achieving social cohesion, unity and harmony. 

Flemingo Foundation, since its inception, has focused on children. Previously, Flemingo Foundation had been running a very successful educational and humanitarian project ‘Educate to Protect’ to raise awareness amongst Sri Lankan school children, as well as their parents and educators, against silent child abuse. In three years, the programme had reached out to more than 25,000 children and 6000 adults, thus enabling and empowering them for a better life.  Flemingo has also sponsored SOS villages in Chennai, India and Africa in the past.