Thank you very much for the generous donation of the djembes!

These will be used for the TrommelPower (“DrumPower”) project. From now on, the event will be offered every two weeks in the Nuremberg branch of the Rummelsberger Jugendhilfe RDJ gGmbH’s outpatient services and is aimed at children and adolescents between the ages of 7 and 14 requiring emotional social support. They work with specialists in relevant fields who cooperate intensively with the families. Sometimes it also makes sense to involve parents. Below, you’ll find a short description of the project and our work:

DrumPower

DrumPower is a violence prevention project that has its academic origins at the Freies Musikzentrum, a music education charity in Munich. The basic idea is to develop a sense of community through simple musical improvisations while preventing violence at the same time. The children are offered the opportunity to express their emotions and aggressive tensions, and to control them in interaction. Rhythmic drumming with simple playing instructions is highly motivating. In the medium of music, we deal creatively with topics such as mutual respect, acceptance of individual differences, appreciative interaction and integration into a community.

As part of our outpatient youth welfare work, we have been putting this project idea into practice with children aged 7 – 14 from severely strained families and with a wide variety of individual behavioral difficulties (aggressive behavior, transgressive behavior, withdrawal behavior due to social fears, limitations in verbal expression, etc.) about every two months since spring 2023. These children are usually care recipients, individually or in the cone context of their families. Working with them in this group, open yet with a clear topical focus allows them to gain positive social experiences with their peers and to expand their social skills – while at the same exploring their abilities with the instrument and expressing themselves. Our colleague, Kirsten Ghosh, is a music therapist who leads the group. So far, she has made the project possible with some of her own and privately loaned instruments, but this has limited group size to a maximum of 6 children and frequency to every two months. Thanks to the donation providing instruments, it is now possible for us to have offer this valuable activity to many more children with special needs much more frequently.

We would like to thank you very much for this on behalf of the children in our care!

Thorsten Kreuzeder