Members
Advisory Board
The Laurier Centre for Music in the Community (LCMC) Advisory Board is comprised of key individuals who represent various sectors of the community. The committe meets bi-annually to deal with matters pertaining to the centre, provide advice to the director, and share their own areas of activity. This committee selects the annual LCMC award winner.
Through story and song, singing together holds the potential to bring healing, build relational connectedness, and envision wholeness that nurtures compassionate justice. It is my joy to collaborate with others at the intersection of spirituality, justice, culture and the arts and to work with the singing community of Inshallah at the Kanata Centre of Martin Luther University College toward the flourishing of all.
Josh Hill is the Vice Principal at Rockway Mennonite Collegiate. He is a graduate of the WLU Masters in Community Music Program and is passionate about using music as a vehicle for social change. In his work in public education, as well as chairperson for the Centre For Sound Music Education Josh contributes his experience in leadership and team building to the creation of community music projects that set up all stakeholders to thrive. It is his opinion that music is the best tool to create common ground between diverse people and build healthy communities. He considers it an honor and privilege to contribute to the work of LCMC and to learn alongside the other amazing board members.
Deanna Yerichuk has dedicated her academic and music career to community-engaged social change. As a researcher, Deanna investigates inclusion and justice in cross-cultural collaborations through music, specializing in participatory research, document analysis, and arts-based research methods. As a performer, Deanna has worked as a singer-songwriter, conductor, actor across Canada. As a community musician, she led the voice and choral department at Dixon Hall Music School (Toronto) for five years, and was a frequent guest conductor for Echo Women’s Choir (Toronto), and worked with Sing for Life (Edmonton) to pilot music classes for mothers in conflict with the law. Deanna currently coordinates the Community Music BMus program at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Peoples of difference, musics of difference, people of colour, world musics, art and cultural musics, classical music. All of these terms represent and affect the way we perceive our world. I work with the Laurier Centre for Music and the Community as a practitioner and scholar who walks the margins and boundaries of musics, arts, spiritualities, justice, and community. I seek to bring renewed emphasis to ways of knowing that focus on common humanity and common good to offset a world fascinated with difference and the creating of “others.” As a multi-instrumentalist, culture carrier, and lineage holder, I feel great responsibility in bringing musical ways together within intercultural ethical frameworks with the intent of creating musical opportunities capable of embracing our many ways of knowing.
https://gerardyunteaching.com/about/
Luisa D'Amato has sung in the Grand Philharmonic Choir for 35 years and is also its executive director. She works with the artistic director and conductors of the adult, children's and youth choirs to produce and build awareness of choral experiences for the community that are innovative, community-focused and high quality. In this capacity she has worked collaboratively with partners such as Centre In The Square, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Kitchener Public Library, and many others. She is a member of the Alliance for a Grand Community (a coalition of larger arts and culture groups in Waterloo Region) which shares strategies and advocates for the arts. She is also a member of the Waterloo Region Arts Awards academy, helping to showcase extraordinary artists in the area. Luisa is also a full-time columnist for the Waterloo Region Record.
Martin (Marinus) de Groot has been active within arts, cultural and heritage circles in Waterloo region since 1993. He served as the Executive Director of the Waterloo Regional Arts Council from 2001-2011, and currently works for the Commons Studio, a community tools project of The Working Centre. Perhaps best known for his weekly arts & culture column in the Waterloo Region Record from 1997 - 2019, he has been active in a number of arts-related initiatives, including as a director of Globe Studios, MT Space and Neruda Arts. Other community involvements include the Grants Committee of the Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation, Waterloo Region Heritage Foundation, Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, and the steering committees for the City of Kitchener CulturePlan I (1995), CulturePlan II (2005) and the Region of Waterloo Arts, Culture and Heritage Master Plan (2003). His contributions were recognized by his peers with the Arts Awards Waterloo Region Lifetime Achievement Award for 2019. Current involvements include board work with InterArts Matrix, CKWR/Wired World, and Arts Network for Children and Youth/ArtsSmarts Canada, as well as ongoing work as editor/host of Promenade community radio magazine for CKWR, and columnist for THEMUSEUM’s CultKW.com project. A historian by training and interest, he has taught courses at the University of Waterloo, Brock University, McMaster University, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of the West Indies, primarily in U.S., North American and Atlantic World history.
Research Fellows
The Laurier Centre for Music in the Community (LCMC) Research Fellows is a position that formally connects scholars and practitioners outside of Laurier to the LCMC. Their scholarship and international recognition in community music provides LCMC with a window on research and practice around the world.
My connection to the Community Music Program at Wilfrid Laurier University has been through my leadership in Community Music and my research. I served as a Community Music Activity Commissioner from 2012-2018 and as an External Examiner for the University of Limerick (Ireland) master’s program in Community Music. I study and practice music-making and well-being with a focus on peacebuilding, collaborative communities, songwriting and improvisation, and goals of creating more communities of caring through music-making in order to provide space for more socially responsible ways of interacting, particularly in prison contexts.
Lee Higgins is the Director of the International Centre for Community Music, York St John’s University, UK. He previously worked at the University of Limerick, Ireland, Boston University, USA, and the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, UK. Higgins received his PhD from the Irish Academy of Music and Dance, Ireland, and has previously been the president of the International Society of Music Education. As a practitioner of community music, he has worked in education as a community musician, as well as in the health sector, and arts organizations.
Dr Gillian Howell is a Dean’s Research Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Her research advances our understanding of the social, cultural, and political contributions of music-making to peacebuilding and community wellbeing in conflict-affected settings. A highly-experienced community musician and community cultural development practitioner, she has worked in post-conflict music development projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste, and with recently-arrived child migrants and English language-learners in Australia. Current community engagement projects include working as the lead artist and facilitator of Tura New Music’s Fitzroy Valley New Music Program, which works alongside First Nations’ communities to develop place-based music projects that strengthen local music capacities, Indigenous language knowledge, and community wellbeing. In 2020 she won the Australian Art Music Award for Excellence in a Regional Area for this work. She has been a keynote speaker in China, Australia, and Colombia, an Australian Government Endeavour Research Fellow in Sri Lanka, a Griffith University Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and a visiting scholar in Colombia and Norway.
Gillian is the 2020-2022 Co-Chair of the International Society for Music Education’s Community Music Activity Commission, and it is through this work that she became affiliated with the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community. Through consecutive CMA gatherings she has come to know and deeply respect the work of LCMC faculty members Lee Willingham, Deanna Yerichuk and Gerard Yun, and to cherish them as inspirational friends and colleagues. She has been delighted to meet and advise LCMC students through online connections, and through the sparks ignited in response to her publications in the International Journal of Community Music, Music and Arts in Action, and various Oxford Handbooks.
Gillian lives and works on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the eastern Kulin Nations in what is now known as Melbourne, Australia, with her partner Tony and small dog Gretel.
I’m very happy to work with the LCMC: building on shared lecture series, our community music winter school and the community music learning youtube channel and collaborate on new projects to come!.
Kathleen Turner is a community musician, researcher, singer and songwriter based in Limerick, Ireland. She is a collaborator of the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community through the international project, Community Music Learning, a growing online resource of lectures, seminars and songs for students of Community Music. Kathleen looks forward to working in collaboration with LCMC in researching the impact and potential of community arts.
I’m delighted to be affiliated to the LCMC – it’s a great initiative which is helping to raise the profile of the impact that music making can have for people and society. Being musical is intricately bound up in being human, and there is no more urgent need than for all humans to find our common humanity in order to be able to collectively address the existential crises facing us and our planet.
Te Oti was the first indigenous academic to be appointed as a commissioner on the Community Music Activities (CMA) research commission. His connection to LCMC began when he co-chaired CMA with Lee Willingham and continues in his role as international collaborator on the LCMC project Community music in Canada: Leading music in culturally diverse contexts for social impact.
I am excited to develop my musical relationship with the students and staff at this fascinating university.
Professor Bartleet looks forward to building on existing connections and collaborations with leading community music researchers at the LCMC to advance our understanding of the cultural, social, and educational benefits of participating in community music across a wide range of contexts from First Nations’ Communities, to prisons, war affected cities, and efforts to address entrenched social inequalities.
I have been a friend of community music at Laurier through my friendship with the late Glen Carruthers who visited my programme in London University many years ago. I have always received a great welcome at the university where I have presented and workshopped with students. My interest lies in promoting the universal adoption of musically inclusive pedagogy in both formal and non-formal contexts and I look forward to further deepening my relationship with Laurier around this and other issues.
LCMC was Room 217’s founding partner in developing the Music Care Conference and the Canadian Music and Aging Network.
My connection to Wilfrid Laurier University has been through highly valued research partnerships, scholarly collaboration, and friendship. I have published widely on topics concerned with psychological perspectives on lifelong musical development, learning and participation in community contexts. My current research interests focus on pedagogies of creativity and collaboration in music-making across the lifespan, including professional and community contexts. I am co-author of ‘Active Ageing with Music’ and ‘Contexts for Music Learning and Participation’; and Co-Editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Music Psychology in Education and the Community.
