In the world’s happiest country, we encountered one of the world’s most challenging Sistema environments. The United Nations World Happiness Report has ranked Denmark the happiest nation on earth, using internationally agreed-upon measures—of wealth, health, social welfare, generosity, and freedom—to rate happiness in 150 countries.

Just outside of Aarhus, the Gellerup district is the largest housing project and the poorest neighborhood in Denmark. Fully 88 percent of its population is comprised of immigrants and refugees from many countries; they are mostly Muslim.

Unemployment is over 70 percent; crime, tension, and poverty are high. The community resists government help and resents the necessity to accept it.

In one Gellerup elementary school where nearly all the children are from immigrant Muslim families, a Sistema-inspired program called MusikUnik (Unique Music) brings ensemble music-making to about fifty second- and third-graders three or four times a week during the school day. 

Inclusion is the first principle of El Sistema. In visiting over a hundred núcleos around the world, we found that no matter how vastly different their cultural settings are, they share a profound dedication to this ideal. The citizen artists who launch and run these programs have chosen to work with children and families who are sidelined— by poverty, discrimination, or other kinds of adversity—from the flourishing centers of their societies. They commit themselves to bringing these children into a state of belonging.

The phenomenon of social exclusion has been increasingly recognized by social scientists as one of the most damaging threats to emotional wellbeing. In 1995, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary argued that a sense of belonging is a fundamental human need, not simply a preference, and that the absence of this sense results in mental illness.17 In more recent research, brain scans have shown that the feeling of being excluded registers in the brain as actual physical pain.

There is also increasing recognition that social exclusion is deeply connected to poverty, with research showing that poor children, whether in the absolute poverty of developing nations or the relative poverty of wealthier ones, often grow up with an abiding sense of exclusion. Some researchers have concluded that social exclusion is the single most damaging result of poverty. “We typically think of stress as being a risk factor for disease,” scientist and professor Steve Cole has said. “And it is. But if you actually measure stress, using our best available instruments, it can’t hold a candle to social isolation. Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psycho- logical risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete.”

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