Mission and Vision

 

Mission, Goals

The mission of the American Recorder Society is to promote the recorder and its music.  Our goals are to be the organization every recorder player wants to join, and to support and grow the diverse recorder community by providing resources and opportunities on the social, educational, and professional levels.  We envision a future in which the recorder and its music are enjoyed, valued and supported across generations, ethnicities and cultures.

Our Stakeholders and Strategies
    1.  Members
First and foremost, we serve our amateur and professional members, chapters, consorts, recorder orchestras, and vendors.  We do this by improving member benefits and member engagement, thereby increasing member satisfaction.  We measure success through member surveys and member retention.

    2.  Non-Member recorder players
We use our website, Facebook, email and other media vehicles to communicate the benefits of membership to non-ARS members of ARS chapters and non-ARS-member recorder players and consorts with the goal of recruiting new members and increasing fundraising.

    3.  Students, Educators and Teaching organizations
Our goal is to provide resources to those teaching and learning the recorder and its music so as to nurture the next generation of recorder players, and improve the visibility and stature of our instrument.

    4.  Non-Member Vendors
Our goal is to communicate to non-member vendors, the benefit of vendor membership and advertising in American Recorder Magazine.

    5.  Non-member Donors
We have a long range goal of accessing grant funds from major donor organizations that support music education so that we can increase ARS funds available to support education outreach to educators and teaching organizations.


Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
The ARS has an overarching goal: to build a strong, vital and inclusive community of recorder players with membership from many different ethnic, socio-economic, racial, and educational backgrounds. We support an inclusive environment, denounce racism and are proud to welcome everyone to our membership, as well as to all our affiliated groups. We pledge to create and maintain an environment where each member feels embraced as an integral part of the blended music that we all make together as a community.

To learn more about composers of color and their contributions to early music, please visit Early Music America's wonderful resource page, Resources for Diversity in Early Music Repertoire.

Another resource for recorder music in particular is Victor Eijkhout's page of arrangements  of music by under-represented composers, primarily women and composers of color: http://www.eijkhout.net/arrangements/under-represented.html

Jamie Allen's arrangements of music by Black composers can be found in the ARS Music Libraries - search for "Allen" and several of the search results will be music from his "Black Composer" music series.