About Play it Forward
Our Goal
Our goal is to encourage and support amateur musicians and music teachers to share their live music with memory care units and nursing homes. We want to help musicians discover how to perform, connect, and make a difference through their service and songs.
Our goal is to encourage and support amateur musicians and music teachers to share their live music with memory care units and nursing homes. We want to help musicians discover how to perform, connect, and make a difference through their service and songs.
How We Help:
- Free and Open to All Musicians – For hobbyists, students, retirees, music teachers, choirs—no auditions or fees.
- Education + Empowerment – Free online training, toolkits, and scripts that teach how to plan and deliver a show.
- A Dual Focus – We encourage and support both individual musicians and music teachers.
- A Scalable Movement – You can perform by yourself, or we can help you do out-of-the-box workshops of your own.
How This Started
My name's Brian, and during COVID my mom faded away in a memory care unit back in Iowa. After that, my 13-year old daughter (the middle one holding her hand) and I started to experiment with playing a few shaky songs in memory care units in honor of her. Two surprising things happened.
1. We improved as musicians and especially as entertainers.
2. We learned connecting with them was more important than playing perfect.
In the years since, people have asked us how they could get started. Some had a parent or grandparent in a memory care unit or nursing home; some wanted to use it as a training ground to improve their performance confidence and stage persona; some others were just curious.
To encourage musicians to volunteer in nursing homes, I found a location to hold a free workshop, I told my friends, and I put up fliers around town.
To break the stereotype that nursing home music would have to be boring, we called the three-hour workshops "Rock the Nursing Home." We would teach hesitant musicians how to create set lists, what equipment to bring, how to interact with residents, and so on.
If they wanted, we'd invite them to play a couple songs in one of our upcoming shows that month. If they played a song or two, they almost always loved it so much they started booking shows on their own.
To encourage musicians from around the country to take the plunge, we changed the name to Play it Forward (PlayitForward.music). We then started to create online "How-to" videos, handouts, letter templates, posters, checklists, and guides to help all musicians from Chicago to LA, from Reno to Sarasota . . . everywhere,
In late 2025, the New York State Student Music Association (NYSSMA) learned of us and awarded us a grant to modify this program to make it available to secondary music choral, band, and orchestra music teachers and their students. Together with Dr. Elise Sobol (NYU), Jonathan Allentoff (Eastman), and Katherine Howell (Lansing, NY High School) we are expanding this to help music educators and students Play it Forward in student combos.
Please let us know what would be useful to get you started.
