How nonprofit is bringing music to kids amid SLO County school funding struggles
On a sunny autumn afternoon at Mary Buren Elementary School in Guadalupe, about a dozen kindergarten and first-grade students sat strumming ukuleles, banging on drums and proudly echoing the choruses of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” and the traditional American folk song “500 Miles.”
The students, led by Central Coast musician Jody Mulgrew, practiced counting, rhythms and pitches — all while getting their wiggles out and staying safe after school.
This free, after-school music club was brought to Mary Buren by Infinite Music — a San Luis Obispo County nonprofit that works to expand access to music education for children on the Central Coast — after the school district lost its music programs entirely, Infinite Music board member Jim Vanko told The Tribune in September.
It’s just one example of how Infinite Music has worked to fill gaps over the last 12 years, as fine arts resources and opportunities have fluctuated in local schools.
The hope is to promote not only lifelong music education and appreciation, but to help students flourish in other aspects of their lives as well.
“Music,” Vanko said, “has so many residual benefits in literacy, academic learning, socialization, the whole thing.”
What is Infinite Music?
Infinite Music got its start in SLO County more than 12 years ago as a tribute to founder Sarah Mason’s brother Robyn Brancart, who died in 2012 after a battle with ALS.
Brancart was a passionate musician throughout his life and was also involved in education, the Infinite Music website said. He performed and toured with various bands after picking up violin and saxophone in his childhood and later learning guitar and piano.
After his death, Mason launched Infinite Music to honor her brother’s legacy and ensure that music education would thrive in her local community.
“It is through Infinite Music that the spirit of Robyn’s musical legacy will help enrich lives, from exciting the curiosity of young people toward self-expression to building life skills like communication, creativity and cooperation,” the website said. “As it was for Robyn, music education and appreciation should be available to everyone — for life.”
The organization has since expanded to offer in-school enrichment opportunities, private voice and instrument lessons, music workshops and live performance and recording opportunities for children in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties.
For the past two years, the organization has also organized an instrument drive, collecting donated instruments from local community members to be restored and given to students in need — or, depending on the value, selling the instruments with profits going to fund Infinite Music programming.
The organization focuses specifically on socioeconomically disadvantaged children whose families otherwise wouldn’t be able to purchase instruments or fund private lessons.
The nonprofit contracts with more than 50 local musicians and music educators who provide the lessons, Vanko said.
“Our programs are focused on innovative learning that exposes young people to a variety of musical genres, both in and out of school,” the nonprofit’s website says. “Students develop themselves academically, musically and socially. They learn to play instruments, sing and perform. And best of all, they become confident, inspired and engaged.”
Music instruction empowers students, supports academics
Third-grader Parsa Rashvandmeli started private piano lessons through Infinite Music’s “Rising Stars” program in January 2025, less than a year after he and his family moved to San Luis Obispo from Iran.
Rising Stars offers private lessons to students in second through 12th grade. Students apply to the program and, for second- through sixth-graders, are evaluated based on financial need. Additional factors like academic achievement and musical talent are included in the evaluation for older students, according to Infinite Music’s website.
Rashvandmeli never played piano prior to starting lessons with Infinite Music, his mother Fatemeh Nayebloie told The Tribune in October, but he picked the instrument up quickly.
After just a few lessons, he was already teaching his 4- and 5-year-old sisters how to play.
Nayebloie said the fact that her son was able to receive a scholarship for piano lessons less than one year after entering the country was “incredible” and she described music as a “universal language.”
The lessons not only brought music into their home, but also helped Rashvandmeli with his academics.
“He realized that following the rules for reading music makes it sound right,” Nayebloie told The Tribune. “And that understanding has helped him in other school subjects, too.”
But in April, after a few months of lessons, the family hit a roadblock when Nayebloie received word that funding for her position at Cal Poly had been terminated. She was at risk of losing her visa if she didn’t find another job, she told The Tribune.
The family was forced to sell their car during her job search and no longer had a way for Rashvandmeli to get to his piano lessons, located in Atascadero.
Despite the challenge, Nayebloie told The Tribune that the lessons were important enough to the family that they began borrowing a friend’s car to get Rashvandmeli to and from Atascadero.
Rashvandmeli was able to complete his 20 weeks of piano lessons through the Rising Stars program, and was set to begin a second round of lessons starting by January, Vanko told The Tribune in an email.
Nayebloie ultimately secured another job in a different department at Cal Poly.
Stories of students whose confidence, schoolwork or social skills have improved after taking music lessons through Infinite Music are common, Vanko told The Tribune in September. It’s especially visible at the annual spring concert that the organization puts on for its students.
“To see them come from being, in some cases, so nervous that they don’t even want to come to the performance and then actually getting up and playing, it’s pretty amazing,” Vanko said.
Sarah Mason also spoke about the role music can play in supporting students not only academically, but socially and emotionally.
“Music has amazing benefits,” she said. “Once a student is introduced to it, especially as children, we know they do better in school and in life.”
Nonprofit helps fill gaps as music classes, resources disappear
Extracurricular music programs are especially critical given the widening gaps for music education in SLO County.
In August, The Tribune reported that Arroyo Grande High School cut its choir program at the end of the previous school year, leaving the district without choir at any of its high schools.
At the time, district spokesperson Amy Jacobs told The Tribune that choir didn’t have enough interest to warrant a class. She said the district was planning to create a club to generate interest in a choir program in the future.
Several months later, the San Luis Coastal school district moved ahead with cuts to its music program.
The district sliced $100,000 from its districtwide music budget in December, leaving $50,000 to share across all school sites for expenses like instrument repair and other costs. The cuts were not set to affect classes or staff, the district said at the time.
Though the music program’s loss was a fraction of the more than $5 million cut from the budget overall, a large group of parents and students mobilized to advocate specifically against the reductions to choir and band in San Luis Coastal.
Ahead of the meeting, the SLO Instrumental Music Boosters Association, which supports music programs at SLO High School and Laguna Middle School, shared a letter saying the proposed cuts threatened the stability of the music programs, The Tribune reported.
Infinite Music aims to help support music education in local communities, especially when funding and resources are fluctuating in local schools.
“(We’re) filling in those gaps, you know, being there and trying to figure out ways we can advocate for music in communities like Guadalupe or in places where they lost their choir program,” Vanko said in a September interview. “That’s kind of becoming a big part of who we are and what we want to do, and we always want to maintain that ability to be able to dive in quickly and make a difference.”
Vanko told The Tribune that the organization has worked with schools from Paso Robles to Morro Bay to Guadalupe to implement its “Makin’ Music” in-school and after-school clubs.
The nonprofit also offers its Rising Stars program from northern SLO County to northern Santa Barbara County, Vanko said.
As resources appear to wane in local schools, Infinite Music’s programming is growing.
The nonprofit recently accepted more than 70 students into its Rising Stars program after receiving a record 154 applications across the two counties, a “dramatic increase” from 2024, Mason told The Tribune in an email.
The group is also adding a new after-school music program across six elementary schools in the Santa Maria-Bonita school district, Mason said.
Infinite Music will host a fundraiser on Jan. 26 at the Bay Theater in Morro Bay that will include a screening of “Immediate Family,” a documentary about studio musicians in the 1970s, Mason said.
Film director Denny Tedesco and bassist and studio musician Leland Sklar will be at the screening, which will also include a pre-show meet-and-greet for VIP guests and a post-show Q&A session.
More information and tickets can be found at My805Tix.com.
This story was originally published January 11, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
