Spotlight on Penny Lazarus

To celebrate Earth Day 2026, we are spotlighting a member of our community known for her fundraising efforts for multiple environmental causes. Lazarus is a piano teacher based in Massachusetts. Her work is well known in her community as she is a regular volunteer at the Newburyport Public School System in addition to her piano studio. In 2025, she was awarded a Community Impact Grant awarded by The Frances Clark Center for her “Fun Friday” project connecting piano students with refugee populations. A regular presenter at national conferences, Lazarus’s work is known across the country and has inspired countless other music teachers.

In 2020, Lazarus’s article “When our Piano Students Inspire Others: The Socially Conscious Piano Studio” was published in Piano Magazine. Below, explore her studio’s efforts to raise money for various environmental causes including The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (rescues baby elephants) and The Audubon Society of Wellfleet (rescues sea turtles).

Engaging in acts of kindness and collaboration is a mainstay of healthy living and a profound way to head off feelings of isolation, burnout, and depression. At the age students typically start piano lessons, they are also reaching a developmental stage in which they begin to think outside of themselves. All schools implement statewide curriculum goals that introduce young people to concepts of community, starting with a student’s town or city. Upper elementary grades work at the state level, middle schools work on understanding our country, and each successive grade builds on our global relationships. Children respond amazingly well when they are given an opportunity to work collaboratively for the greater good of their community, and it becomes important for us as teachers to remind our students that we study music because it is a collaborative, social, communicative art between ourselves and others. 

My students have found inspiration to practice through their ability to use music to do good for the world around them. Students can help others by playing for charity benefits or, in this case, asking family members to sponsor their practicing (much like Walks for a Cause or Race for the Cure). This feeling of “agency,” the ability to successfully urge others to make a change, is incredibly motivating for all of us, including our youngest students.  

One year, my students worked with our local Audubon center to foster rescued cold-stunned sea turtles. Another year we worked with a foundation in Kenya that rescues baby elephants abandoned by ivory poachers. We have opened the walls of our studio to the outside community, making connections with music studios across the world, including post-communist Albania and a new music school in the environmentally sensitive Easter Island in the South Pacific Ocean. It is not difficult to implement some community projects into your studio. If you do, I think you will find that your students will practice with renewed intention. Then, perhaps, they will return again and again to the piano as they discover that music speaks, as Victor Hugo spoke, of that “which we must not be silent.”

We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from Penny Lazarus’s article about her piano studio and their fundraising projects. You can read the entire article by clicking here.