Changing Hearts & Minds

Through Music & Memory, Dan has been working for over two years to bring personalized music to elders suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia. His goal, and ours too, is to make personalized music a standard of care in all nursing homes and long-term care facilities in the U.S., but he hasn’t had the easiest time getting the medical community to buy into his idea.

Alive Inside just may be changing that.

After seeing Alive Inside at one of our early screenings at the Rubin Museum, an executive from the New York City Health & Hospitals Corporation (HHC) — the largest municipal healthcare system in the United States, serving 1.4 million patients across nearly 100 facilities — shared his thoughts on the film with some of his colleagues. Just days later we were asked to screen Alive Inside‘s rough cut at New York City’s famous Bellevue hospital – an HHC facility.

Given the difficulty we’ve watched and documented Dan experience, we were a little apprehensive about showing the film to a room full of senior hospital administrators and clinicians. Would they dismiss Alive Inside and its message? Would they be skeptical of Dan’s work?

It turns out that they were moved beyond what we could have imagined, and since the screening, HHC has expressed interest in implementing 3,000 iPods and Music & Memory into a number of their facilities.

This has been our experience every time we’ve screened the film — so many in our audiences have been inspired and then immediately moved to pay it forward.

Alive Inside is giving breath to Music & Memory, and we are working hard to finish it so that we can see the change its made among hundreds take effect in the larger world.

The film is moving hearts and minds and when you see it, we hope it will do the same for you.