About us

A group of people
who play

Echoo is an Italian non-profit association that supports social development projects through music. It began in Rovereto and today works between Rovereto and Trento, where its offices are inside Centro Musica Trento: the youth-policy project of the City of Trento, entrusted to UpDoo! oo, run by Lorenzo Frizzera.

The first container of instruments left for Burundi in 2014, and the association itself was founded in 2016. Since then we have opened and reopened schools, invented a cardboard guitar, opened a second-hand shop, played in some forty living rooms and started backing the projects of young Italian artists.

The name

Why Echoo

An echo is a simple thing: you send a sound out and it comes back. But it never comes back the same — the place that returns it adds something of its own, and so do the distance and the time it took.

It is the most honest way we have found to describe what we do. Something leaves here: a container of instruments, a cardboard guitar, a teacher's monthly wage. What comes back is always something else, and it is always more: a choir singing in Kirundi, an end-of-year concert in tropical rain, a boy in Rutovu who has stopped looking at the street.

That is why we do not care for the word “charity”. We are not handing something to somebody: we are putting back into circulation a thing that already belongs to everyone, and that whoever receives it returns changed.

The same goes for the people who help us from this end. Whoever donates a guitar that was sleeping in the cellar, whoever opens their living room for an evening, whoever spends a Saturday in the storeroom: they send something out and find themselves inside a wider circle than they had imagined.

The name is recent and the change is still under way: on paperwork and on the bank account the association is still called UpDoo! oo World.

Board

Aurora PontaltiPresident

Lorenzo FrizzeraFounder

Niccolò ContiVice-president, treasurer, founder

Chiara RaffaelliSecretary, founder

Greta MarcolongoBoard member

Riccardo GalliBoard member

Communications

Patrizia VaccariCoordinator

Giacomo RaffaelliVideo

Federico ScrinziWeb

Volunteers and collaborators

Around the board there is a wider group of volunteers, looking after artistic direction, the storeroom, the workshops and the website.

Patrizia Vaccari — artistic direction
Riccardo Galli — volunteer
Gianfranco Agostini — volunteer
Sabina Bovio — ANFFAS Trentino
Federico Scrinzi — website
Antonio Frizzera — hosts the European volunteers
Luisa Zambelli — hosts the European volunteers

European volunteers

We host young people from the European Solidarity Corps: they live here for a few months and work with us on the projects, the workshops and communications.