MIAMI – Music is one of the most powerful tools in education and child development.
Making early music education accessible to all children across the barriers of financial and physical challenges is the mission of musician, researcher, and former elementary school teacher Joy Galliford.
She’s known as simply ‘Doctor Joy”.
She pours all her experience and energy into her nonprofit Friends of South Florida Music.
Her program is in schools all over Miami-Dade, serving underserved children, called Music FUNdamentals, with the emphasis on “fun” explicit.
“We provide free weekly music education classes to children of all abilities currently year-round in 2016 we started with 97 children and now we are over 800 who receive this same class every week,” Joy Galliford, Ph.D., executive director.
In a classroom of special needs children at Promised Land Academy in Homestead, she is clearly beloved by her students.
She leads them in song, gets them moving, gets down on the floor, jumps up and down, shakes rattles, and rolls with them too. The positive energy is palpable, the learning is a bit more subtle.
“Music is a natural way for children to stimulate gross motor, fine motor, cognitive language, and self-help skills without them ever noticing that they’re doing that. My goal is to try to have every child have this opportunity.”
Her story begins with a musical childhood in West Virginia.
“My family sang every Sunday night together,” she added that her first music experience was in the womb, as her mother played piano.
“I started at the age of 13 teaching piano lessons in my hometown because there was not a piano teacher there, I also became a choir director in a local church.”
She came to Miami for college and graduated from the University of Miami.
She went from teacher to Hurricane Andrew relief worker as a missionary and was recruited to battle a huge problem facing Little Havana’s vulnerable kids in a program with then Dade County Commission.
“I worked to keep children off the streets – kids who were being asked to be in gangs at a third and fourth-grade level,” she recalled, adding that her moniker was ‘the gringo on eighth street.’ “I loved every minute of that work.”
Tara Collado has known Galliford for nearly ten years.
She has been a music instructor for Friends of SF Music for three of these years and loves the interaction with students of all abilities.
“When you see a student who may not be verbal, that they are participating and engaging and doing all the things that we ask then to do – you see how powerful this program is,” said Collado.
“For me, she’s (Galliford) been a mentor and a guide.”
Both of Collado’s daughters are students at Doctor Joy’s private music school, South Florida Music.
Many of these students that have known Galliford their whole lives become mentors and volunteers and perform in concert fundraisers that fuel the nonprofit.
It is a special connection indeed.
“When I take a child into my home for private lessons, I am making a decision to invest in personal level in them,” Galliford said.
“They write college essays about this organization and how music has made a difference in their lives.”
CBS4 meteorologist Lissette Gonzalez served as emcee for the most recent concert for the nonprofit, her daughter is also one of Dr. Joy’s students, and performed in the recital.
The accolades for Friends of South Florida Music and Galliford include the 2021 Non-Profit Honoree for Women’s Chamber of Commerce of Miami-Dade, and 2022 nominee for The Children’s Trust Champion for Children Award, and a 2022 Florida Coalition for Children Champion Award as well.
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