Four music students at Carnegie Mellon University are proving you don't have to be wealthy to be benefactors. They're raising money to fund a scholarship they've started that will benefit incoming, first-term freshmen.
The rising cost of higher education and the burden of debt most students carry upon graduation is a national issue. Carnegie Mellon is an expensive university, where undergraduate tuition in the school of music for the 2015-16 academic year is $49,610.
At a recent lunch at the Casbah restaurant in Shadyside to discuss the Carnegie Mellon Heritage Scholarship Campaign, several of the founders mentioned what a delight it was to take a break from a ramen noodles diet.
They're grateful for the education they're receiving and decided to give back to their school and ease the burden for the next generation of music students.
“This is something the students are passionate about and something the university, the school needs, so I got together with these ladies. We decided, why not try to help solve the problem ourselves?” says Christin Danchi, 29, of Cary, N.C., who earned her master's at CMU and is working on a violin-performance certificate.
The other founders are Alyssa Wang, 21, of San Francisco, a violin performance major who's also studying conducting and creative writing; Laurel Beatty, 20, of Apollo, a saxophone-performance major who's designing a music management and entrepreneurship degree; and clarinetist Katie Russell, 26, of Syracuse, N.Y., who is working on an advanced music studies certificate after earning bachelor's and master's degrees at CMU.
“We have actually done a lot together over the past two years I've been here,” Danchi says. “They're real go-getters who like to do new things, try things that might be a little crazy.”
The four students put together a proposal for the scholarship over the summer and sent it for review to Denis Colwell, head of the school of music. They started the campaign in August with an initial goal of $50,000, the minimum needed for the scholarship to be vested.
“You take 5 percent of that, and the scholarship would provide $2,500 per year. But we want to go as high as we can because the more we raise, the bigger the scholarship can be,” Danchi says.
The founders created a multifaceted approach to raising money, which includes emails and printed materials, crowd-funding, offering home concerts to benefactors for donations of a thousand dollars or more,and a benefit concert in March 2016 by former Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Andres Cardenes and his CMU students. Potential corporate donors will be approached in the spring.
“I really like how we're reaching out to such a wide audience,” Wang says. “It's definitely better than having one person (fund) it. It's not only raising money. It's raising awareness, as well, and creating a really positive energy that's helping us.”
Initial response to the scholarship campaign has been stronger than anticipated. As of Nov. 9, they had raised $23,000.
“I didn't expect the faculty to be touched by our idea, but they jumped in and gave us our first four or five thousand dollars to get started,” Danchi says.
In addition, CMU President Subra Suresh has agreed to match the first $50,000 raised.
“There's no precedent for this campaign, as far as I could check on the Internet,” Colwell says. “The most remarkable thing is that it will not benefit the students who are raising the money. It will benefit those who follow them. It's so altruistic.”
Details: music.cmu.edu/pages/heritage
Mark Kanny is classical music critic for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-320-7877 or mkanny@tribweb.com.
