The grant, awarded as a part of the Digital Media and Learning Competition administered by the MacArthur Foundation, will allow Robison and his collaborators, Hugo Berkley and Josephine Dorado, to provide a positive outlet for response to both daily events and major news, like natural disasters or wartime conflicts.
“I think people genuinely want to help others and seek change, and Fractor gives them a simple tool to do so. This empowerment helps create communities centered on giving and hope. Our goal is for the website to become a marketplace for citizens and nonprofits who seek to meet community needs,” Robison said.
Robison’s idea formed after September 11, 2001, which inspired him to become more civically active.
“I was invited to a U.N. Millennium Development Goals conference along with congressional leaders, youth organizers, and high school students. Through the discussion of international needs, it struck me that it was one thing to expose people to what’s going on in the world, but another thing to give them a way to feed into the system, to interact,” Robison said.
Fractor is just one example of Robison’s commitment to altruistic endeavors. In 2001, as a doctoral student in musical arts, he founded the Musicians’ Alliance for Peace, which has sponsored more than 350 charity concerts in 30 countries. A number of concerts raised money for hospitals, which contributed to his decision to apply to and enroll in Columbia University’s Postbac Premed Program. He decided to take the success of using music for community outreach and apply it to understanding how he could physically heal people.
“I am very interested in human creativity and its positive impact on individual and community health. Creativity through music has positively motivated me for the past 30 years, and now I am looking forward to learning about how the human body’s biological response to creativity can heal,” Robison said.
