David Wish

Activist, Change Agent, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Musician, Social entrepreneur

Dave Wish is the Founder and Executive Director of Little Kids Rock. Little Kids Rock is a nonprofit organization that funds and runs the largest free, instrumental music programs in US public schools today. Little Kids Rock is also a leading provider of free instruments and curriculum. Mr. Wish has initiated and managed the launch of campaigns to restore and revitalize music education for over 200,000 low-income children in ten states. Little Kids Rock cities include Dallas,TX, Tampa, FL, New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, CA, Nashville, TN, Atlanta, GA, Houston, TX, San Francisco, CA and over a dozen others. Mr. Wish is a recognized social entrepreneur and has been awarded numerous honors for his work in the field. He has received fellowships from Ashoka, The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, The Goldhirsh Foundation and the Kenneth A. Picerne Foundation. He has been a speaker at various events that highlight work of social entrepreneurs including Imagine Solutions, TEDx and NYU's Reynolds School and Legacy Ventures. In 1996, while working as a first grade teacher in an inner-city school in California, Mr. Wish pioneered a methodology and curriculum to offer instrumental and vocal rock music classes to his students. His approach focused heavily on pop oriented performance, composition and improvisation. Emboldened by the success of the program at one school, he founded Little Kids Rock in 2002. Since that time, Little Kids Rock has catapulted onto the national stage and is increasingly impacting the way that music is being taught across the country. Mr. Wish has a BA from Brandeis University and a teaching degree from the College of Notre Dame. Prior to his ten-year stint as an elementary school teacher in inner city schools, Mr. Wish worked as a jazz guitarist. He lives with his wife and two rocking children in New Jersey.

Music education is my driving passion matched only by my belief that educational parity is a prerequisite for the advancement of humanity. Attracted to social enterprise in many forms!

Our children wanna rock! Music education in the US is waning due to lack of investment as well as a lack of relevancy from the vantage point of learners. When our children are fortunate enough to have music classes at their schools, they often drop out because the experience can be alienating or disempowering. We need a new, fifth stream of music education in our schools: modern band. Alongside the existing 4 streams (marching band, chorus, jazz band & orchestra) modern band will add to our kids' options. Modern band programming teaches children to play, compose and improvise in the musical genres that they are most familiar with: rock, rap, reggae, funk etc. In short, modern band puts the music of the past 50 years in schools on a national level. Children need to see themselves reflected in their educations. Modern band leverages the cultural capital of or students and revitalizes music education!

bilingual education, Elementary Education, Language Acquistion, Music Education

At my TEDx talk, I picked six random people from the audience who had never played musical instruments before in their lives and, in less than one minute, I fashioned them into a band. That band of fledgling musicians got a rousing round of applause from the audience. Afterwards, an audience member approached me and, in a friendly way, accused me of having had actual musicians PRETEND that they were rank amateurs. I still had two of the guitars we used in the demonstration and was able to immediately give my friendly inquisitor his own, one-minute guitar lesson during which time I taught him how to take a guitar solo. He was so moved by the experience and, half laughing, half crying, thanked me for pulling back a veil. “I believed, until now, that I had ZERO musical talent but you just proved me wrong. Thank you!!” That sort of made my day.

Defusing tense situations, being a positive enabler, dancing, juggling, changing cloth diapers, shooting rubber bands at targets and telling very accessible to somewhat abstract musician jokes