Action Plan Title: Crescendo: Mental Health and Music Education

KaKi L.

Hometown/Country: Beijing, China

Program/Year: Leadership Institute On-Campus (2024)

Please describe your Action Plan in one sentence

Crescendo aims to organize music workshops and fundraising events, including concerts, to support the music education and emotional well-being of children at Happy School by providing instruments and fulfilling their personal wishes

Describe your project in detail, including what steps you've taken to advance your project. 

Currently the primary organization that we are working with is Happy School. Happy School is a charity that aims to support kids receiving  Leukemia treatment.

We organized a concert in February 2025. It was a fundraiser concert, where we fundraised around $2000 dollars through concert tickets. While generating financial support, this provides an opportunity for bands and music lovers in internationals schools around Beijing to perform. With the money, we donate instruments to Happy school, furthermore, a large portion goes towards the 'Wish List project', where we buy surprise gifts for the kids who are going through chemotherapy. 

The service part of our organization focuses on designing and organizing music workshops for the children. Our project won a $1000 grant from the ACAMIS student service grant award for 2025, which select and offer a grant for the top 10 student initiatives among Chinese and Mongolian international schools

What next steps will you take regarding your Action Plan?

I am currently planning on a Christmas fundraiser concert in my school, which is sponsored by our school and MCF (Migrant Children's Foundation). We wish that through this concert, we can expand our impact beyond the current community. Further on, we've been planning on an online platform as a form of continuous engagement with online workshops. We will be communicating with Happy School and our school, through which we will try to build this longterm connection by having weekly online workshops with the involvement from parents, teachers and students.

What impact do you think your project has had? 

Through the 'Wish List Project', we've fulfilled more than 100 wishes. It all felt so surreal until I received recordings of the kids with their surprises thanking our team. For me, the impact this project had on me was more than just quantitative values of awards won or grants earned, it was when I've came to a realization that I could actually make an impact.

How have others been involved in your project? What are their respective roles? If you did work with other people, what are the challenges and benefits of working with others? If you've done this project almost entirely on your own, how can you get others involved? 

After developing the idea of the project in Brown Leadership Institute, I went back to my school and proposed the idea to my cohort. I have been closely working with two other students as the core group of running this project. This project is a lot to handle, from logistics planning to concert and stage directing, from finance to organizing workshops. I believe is it vital to have a few core members that you could trust and discuss when making decisions

What challenges and obstacles have you experienced and how have you addressed these challenges?

One issue that I experienced was to be able to encourage more passionate students to join. This is a project that purely originated from my personal interest in performing arts, therefore despite making quite a bit impact in my community, other students may be hesitant to join or are just not as engaged as I would be. I decided to communicate with them into encouraging them to take action in designing online workshop programs that is overlooked by Crescendo.

What knowledge or skills did you learned during your BELL/Leadership Institute course you have applied to your work on this project? 

I still remember during the first orientation meeting that there was the quote 'Youth are not our Future, Youth are Now'. It really hit me as a motto in supporting my actions. We have the responsibility to take action and make changes, we don't have to wait for the future. We are capable of make this world a better place, now. 

What tips or advice?

Never be afraid to reach out and connect. At the start, reaching out to teachers or charities may seem daunting, but ultimately, you are all together for the same goal, broadly saying, to make the world a better place. Reaching out allows you to gain new perspectives and learn from others’ strengths. Working on an initiative can feel overwhelming at first, but collaboration and communication make the process much smoother. An action plan is not just about completing tasks and ticking boxes, it's about what you want to do. It's about your growth, reflection and building relationships with people that have similar ideals.