The Practice for the Elephants Contest is under way at the Cape Ann Piano Studio!
My piano students are practicing piano to raise money to continue to foster our baby elephants, who have been orphaned because of illegal poaching.
Keep reading to find out how you can become a matching donor!
About the contest:
Students earn two cents for every minute practiced over the course of 4 weeks. At the end, we total up the minutes to figure out how much each student has raised. Students’ sponsors can be parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, close friends of the family.
But new this year, students have matching donors: each matching donor is paired with a particular student and will match what that student earns.
Each student generally earns between $8–$15 for practicing. Can you match what they earn? I have 14 young students participating in the contest, and they all need matching donors. The kids are so excited that their contribution will be doubled! Our goal is to raise enough to continue to foster our 10 baby elephants. (It’s $50 a year per orphaned elephant.)
If you’d like to be a matching donor for a great cause, please contact me and I will pair you up with a student!
Why Pianos and Elephants?
As pianists we are very aware of the history of using ivory for piano keys and that the manufacture of pianos once contributed to the trade in ivory. But today, piano technicians use polymers and mixtures of plastics to create the look and feel of ivory for our piano keys, bypassing entirely the illegal trade in ivory elephant tusks.
Where Our Donations Go
The donations collected go to sponsor abandoned baby elephant cubs whose mother or father was killed from illegal poaching of ivory in Africa. The orphaned baby elephants are raised and kept safe for later release by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Foundation in Nairobi, Kenya where it operates the Tsavo East National Park.
Click here for more details on the contest and on the Foundation.
Please also visit the The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust website.
You can also follow the Trust on FB: https://www.facebook.com/thedswt
Here’s another website, iworry.org, where you can take action toward ending the ivory trade.
Meet One of Our Elephants
Cape Ann Piano Studio 