Everybody's Everybody: A Musical Promoting Awareness of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

Everybody's Everybody is a dramatic musical for children, by children, for raising awareness around hunger and helping children who are hungry.

Written by Merrill Collins and Frederick Gums, Everybody's Everybody was originally produced as a benefit for hungry children during the 1985 famine in Ethiopia. This guide for adult directors and volunteers promotes awareness of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which consists of 54 articles that define children's rights, and guidelines for how governments should work together to make them available to all children.

Anne Frank said, "Hunger is not a problem. It is an obscenity. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Under the terms of the convention, governments are required to meet children's basic needs and help them reach their full potential. Hunger and famine can appear anywhere, anytime, and can be temporary or persistent. But feeding the hungry is an immediate benefit that anyone can do, anywhere in the world. This musical project is an excellent way to raise awareness and bring communities together to help.

An instrumental soundtrack is available for those who can't perform with live musicians, which is always preferable. The book also contains a 5-minute excerpt, "Help them Live," which can promote the musical or stand alone.

Composer Merrill Collins has created a wide body of work that engages listeners and communities alike, with a heart-centered mission for global harmony and humanist evolution. A neoclassical musician out of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she built a diversity of musical styles playing for master classes with the Alvin Ailey Dance Co., Mark Morris Co., Joe Goode, Janice Garrett, Frank Shawl, Josie Moselie, as well as a series of collaborations with Duncan Dancer Mary Sano. She applied her knowledge of world music to creating music and community service projects for Montessori schools, YMCA School Age Child Care programs, private, paraochial, and public schools, and developed a human rights curricula that became the Pathways to Peace model for children's peace education still in use today with the United Nations. Three multimedia pieces and humanitarian projects that were produced internationally later became published as the We Agree! music books that teach about key world agreements: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Toward a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration. Merrill's works have been performed for the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations, UNCHR Human Rights Day, Amnesty International, United Way, UN World Habitat Day, Earth Day. Her production of Minute of Silence was featured in three languages in a global broadcast for the International Day of Peace. Merrill received a Global Peace Song Award in 2016 for her composition "Every Man, Woman, and Child," which was included on the 2017 Project Peace on Earth compilation. Merrill is a voting member of the Grammy Foundation (NARAS), and her volumes of neoclassical piano music in collaboration with world class artists can be found on www.spiralingmusic.com, as well as on her live music site, www.merrillcollinsmusic.com.

Kristen Caven is the author of books that build skills for treating ourselves and each other with dignity.