Heathcliff Sygapolho gives free violin lessons to inspire confidence in the next generation.

Every day Sygapolho spends two hours teaching at the Prince Joshua Avitto Community Center. He has been a teacher for 20 years and played the bass growing up, but he learned the violin to better reach and motivate his students.

“What I know with the instrument, usually the violin and music trigger the left side of the brain so if they can trigger that mathematical [skill] or the critical thinking skills by playing an instrument, and reading-wise it helps them to focus from lines to lines, so I think that’s a tool that they could use to like excel in their academics,” he explained.

The community center was named in honor of a six-year-old who was fatally stabbed inside a house complex in 2014. East New York has one of the highest violent crime rates in the city.

Sygapolho doesn’t expect every student to become a professional, but he keeps a love of music as a guide to each lesson.

“Music to me is—it’s love. It’s reasoning, and it’s motivation,” he explained. “Motivation, because like a lot of, for me, music has taken me a lot of places that I wouldn’t have been to and meet people that I wouldn’t have met.”

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