Year: 2018–2019 | Role: Co-founder
Music Education · Community Development · Social Enterprise
The Challenge
In Chiang Mai, access to music education is almost entirely determined by money. Children who grow up in ethnic minority communities, in orphanages, or without legal status have no pathway to learn an instrument: not because the interest isn’t there, but because no one has built the infrastructure for them.
Meanwhile, Chiang Mai has a thriving community of working musicians who learned because someone gave them access. We wanted to pay that forward.
What I Did
บ้านปันเสียง started with a small group: Pharadon Phonamnuai from North Gate Jazz Co-op, Paul Sugars who ran Thapae East, myself, and Tanatkun Susukh as musicians who play at their both places. We were musicians who believed all children deserved a safe space to learn and be received, and that music was a way to build that space.
We launched with a concert event at Thapae East in July 2018, part press conference and part community gathering. We accepted instrument donations in any condition: old, broken, as long as they could be repaired. We brought together Chiang Mai musicians, the Keetatarn Mudhouse network from Bangkok, and Music Sharing from Khlong Toey for an evening of music and honest conversation about what we were trying to build.
At the same event, we connected with the Stateless People’s Network, which works with 350 children across three schools founded by Burmese migrant workers: parents who had pooled 6 baht each per day from their wages to build schools for children who had no birth certificates, no legal status, and no right to access public education. That detail stopped me. Six baht a day, from people earning almost nothing, because they understood that their children deserved to learn.
We established our weekend music school at วัดทรายมูล, a Burmese temple that was already a gathering space for that community. Music college students in their third and fourth year came to teach as volunteers. The children came to learn.
Outcomes
I wrote on Teacher’s Day that year: “The thing that has helped me grow most in the past year or two is the children, through working with them at บ้านปันเสียง. It was the first time I truly learned both sympathy and empathy at depth. Working with children requires letting go of your ego entirely. It requires compassion in how you think, how you act, and how you communicate. And it taught me that everything has its time and space: results don’t arrive ready-made. Every kind of growth takes time.”
I still think that. Today I understand people better in my work, the patience it takes, the quality of attention required, because of what the children at บ้านปันเสียง taught me.