heads. I don't know how they do it." She believes that the fundamental cause of America's social problems is the inadequacy of its education system. In 2007, she began developing, paying for and participating in a music programme at the St Martin de Porres parochial elementary school in Oakland after meeting its president, Sister Barbara Dawson, at one of FACE's events. (Sister Barbara was a member of the same Convent of the Sacred Heart that had provided von Stade with much of her own education.) As well as being taught choral singing by von Stade herself, the children at St Martinresidents of one of Oakland's most disadvantaged neighbourhoodswere offered lessons in dancing, the violin, the guitar and the piano, and were treated to visits by Chanticleer and students from the San Francisco Conservatory performing their staging of Hänsel und Gretel. Von Stade also took a group of 8th-graders to the War Memorial Opera House to be introduced to Don Giovanni. In 2009, five of the school's pupils accompanied her on her journey to Washington to perform at the birthday celebrations of Ted Kennedy, with the expenses of their journey defrayed by the proceeds of benefit concerts that she had organized. When the Bishop of Oakland closed the school in 2017 as part of a diocese-wide rationalization, she described herself as heartbroken. A secular educational programme that von Stade espoused in parallel with her work at St Martin de Porres has proved more enduring. A project built chiefly by the late soprano Daisy Newmannamed by von Stade as the contemporary whom she most admiresthe Young Musicians Choral Orchestra (formerly known as the Young Musicians Program) was created under the aegis of the University of California, Berkeley. It caters to some seventy children between the ages of ten and eighteen who came from families with an income of less than $25,000 a year. As well as providing them with subsidised tuition in music, it aims to foster their personal development more broadly: its goal is to enable as many of them as possible to proceed either to a music college or a university. "Most of our kids have been homeless," von Stade said in 2018. "You just can't believe their storiesor their lives. Music is a lifeline for them." She helps the YMCO's students by promoting concerts that showcase them, sometimes performing with them herself; on January 31, 2010, for example, listeners