Submitted by Bernhard Kerres, ACC, Be Your Own Manager
Coaching provided to a group of classical musicians

Covid-19 poses an existential crisis for classical musicians and many artists around the world. Suddenly they face no income, no social security and no support. With a modest annual income, many musicians do not have large savings. Within weeks it became a challenge for them to pay their rent and other fixed expenses.

In that dire situation, I wanted to support them in not losing hope and in believing in the value of their music to society. Understanding the size of the community, I also wanted to ensure that I not only impacted a few individuals, but created something which could grow.

I started with coaching individual artists pro bono. Then I started teaching a career management and entrepreneurship course for classical musicians. As part of the course, I introduced group coaching and peer group coaching — initially under the supervision of mentors I’d trained — teaching musicians to support and help each other.

This has grown to more than 20 groups of 4-8 classical musicians from all around the world — Australia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Nigeria, Europe, USA and Brazil. Most groups are now self-managed, but they sometimes come back to me for pro bono supervision. I’ve started to train more mentors to support those groups.

This project seeks to help musicians find hope, increase their self value, collaborate on a worldwide basis and even find ways to make money again during this difficult time.

You can read some of their testimonials here.