How Olympias Began
Olympias Music Foundation (Olympias) started its life in March 2015 as a small community music project run by a group of students at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM). Pianist Jo Yee Cheung, violinist Leona Tveite and flautist Felix Niël were volunteering, providing free music lessons to children at local schools in Greater Manchester. One of these local schools asked if they would be interested in providing 1:1 instrumental lessons to their pupils. A small amount of pupil premium money was available that allowed eight children to have weekly lessons for one term. These lessons were successful and so the school expanded the provision to a further eight pupils, and then a further eight. Over the next three years, Jo, Leona and Felix worked with forty children across three different schools.
It soon grew and they hustled to get instruments and resources, making a clear decision to pay the Musicians Union's recommended rates of pay despite the shoestring budget. It was not until 7 years after this in 2022 that CEO Jo Yee Cheung would receive a wage or reimbursement from the charity.
Olympias was formally registered with the charity commission in April 2017 which enabled them to apply for funding and professionalise. The Trustees at the time included Jo Yee Cheung, Joseph Markus (barrister at Garden Court North), Reverend Ian Gomersall (the vicar at St Chrysostom’s school, where lessons were held), and Helen Krizos (Professor of Piano at RNCM, who remains a trustee).
Leona and Felix moved to Norway in July 2016, and Jo continued to run the charity alone with the help of a group of freelance teachers who delivered the music lessons across different schools. The charity has gone through three distinct phases in its development into the organisation it is today:
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From 2015 to 2018 music lessons were paid for by local schools through the pupil premium and delivered in local schools.
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From 2019 to 2021 music lessons were paid for by Olympias, and delivered within local schools.
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From 2021 to the present day music lessons were paid for by Olympias and delivered independently of schools outside of school hours in premises run by Olympias.
Olympias’s earliest supporters were the Maingot Charitable Trust, who heard about them after they won the National Community Integration Awards in 2017. They became the first funders to support Olympias in paying for the lessons independently - instead of through the schools and enabled the hiring of a freelance Development Manager to help with fundraising.
Olympias is now supported by many Trusts and Foundations including Arts Council England, Garfield Weston Foundation, National Lottery Community Fund, the Oglesby Charitable Trust and many others.
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The Olympias Model​​
Developed over ten years, Olympias has arrived at an innovative model that is proving highly successful in delivering free music education to young people experiencing low income. It promotes a radical rethinking of music education provision to provide every young person with the opportunity to learn an instrument.
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completely free 1:1 music lessons and instruments for children and young people in families experiencing low income
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sustained learning, delivered in the community, in a quiet space like a library, by exceptional teachers who are paid well
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involves the whole family and regular contact with parents
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regular concerts and events that bring the families and the community together
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a network of leading music partners such as the RNCM to open up more opportunities for our young people and build their cultural capital
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the training of teachers from Global Majority backgrounds, to teach western and Global Majority instruments
About Jo Yee Cheung, founder of Olympias
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“As a teenager, I played violin in my city youth orchestra, sang in choirs, received an organ scholarship and accompanied services at St Mark’s Church I started to write and perform my own songs at open mic nights, recorded a self-penned EP and travelled across Europe playing bass with my local jazz band. These formative experiences in music opened up my world and gave me the skills, broad perspectives and a curiosity for new experiences.
“At fourteen I became much more serious about piano after starting lessons with a Ukrainian concert pianist and teacher called Valentina Kalashnik, and began to envisage a professional career as a musician. From seventeen I read Music at the University of Cambridge and studied privately with the late Professor Niel Immelman at the Royal College of Music. I then went on to the Royal Northern College of Music to do a Master's degree in Piano Performance on a scholarship, followed by a fully-funded PhD in Music Education.
“On secondment from my PhD, I went to the University of Canberra in Australia as a Visiting Research Fellow. While there, I had the good fortune of working with Professor Deborah Pino-Pasternak, one of the world’s leading experts on early childhood cognitive development. She helped me to understand the connection between family environment and children’s cognitive development in a way which has transformed the way I view music teaching and learning. This was a foundational influence on our approach to family-wide musical engagement at Olympias.
“My journey to founding the Olympias Music Foundation began in 2015. During my first year at the RNCM, I was living in Rusholme and volunteering in local primary schools in Longsight to perform in assemblies and give musical show-and-tell sessions for children. I would sometimes bring friends along to play with me and the children were always excited to see us. Their first question was always “How can I learn to play an instrument’?” So it very quickly became apparent that there was no free musical provision in their schools and indeed in the city of Manchester - so there was no way for them to learn to play an instrument if their parents didn’t have the means to pay for lessons. For these children, who were all receiving
free school meals and living in an area in the top 10% of urban deprivation in the UK, accessing music lessons was impossible.
“This was the beginning of my journey to founding the Olympias Music Foundation and to change the status quo, not by giving lessons myself, but by facilitating, sourcing instruments, arranging timetables, and organising concerts.”
Jo Yee Cheung
“I began piano lessons at the age of six. My earliest and happiest musical memories are of singing in my primary school choir and being invited to take part in a choir competition at the Royal Festival Hall in London. I benefited immensely from local music organisations such as Sheffield Music Service, Yorkshire Youth Choir and Sheffield Music Academy, where I received both piano and violin lessons part-funded by the government Music and Dance scheme.
