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Our Team

Rob Jack

Interim Executive Director

Rob is a Middle Tennessee native who began working with Music for Seniors in 2021 as a management consultant, helping Sarah develop a strategic plan for the future of the organization that would provide a continued growth path in Middle and East Tennessee while putting the operational elements in place to be able to expand even further. Also, after 15 years as Executive Director, Sarah decided that this would also be a good time to develop her exit strategy and chart her next professional trajectory, while still being an ardent advocate for and supporter of the organization she founded.

Fast forward to July 2022 – the Board of Directors asked Rob to take on an Interim Executive Director role to evolve and implement the strategic plan while working with Sarah to divest her executive management responsibilities and focus her energies on what she loves most – producing programs, performing on stage and advocating for and lighting up the lives of older adults across Tennessee. Over the next year, Rob will continue to advance the mission of Music for Seniors while preparing to conduct a search in 2024 to recruit and hire the next permanent Executive Director for Music for Seniors.

Over the past 24 years, Rob has been a business leader and management consultant across a variety of industries including manufacturing, warehousing/logistics, consumer packaged goods, education, technology, nonprofit, and healthcare. He also leads Rob Jack Consulting, LLC and is an expert in guiding organizations through disruptive change, with a significant focus on strategic planning and strategy implementation in nonprofit organizations. He has previously held product and technology leadership roles at Mars Petcare, Education Networks of America and management consulting roles at c3/consulting.

Rob was previously a Board member and the Governance Committee Chair for Alive Hospice. He served as Vice President of the Board of Directors of Conexión Américas and now serves as a PTO officer at his daughters’ Metro Nashville Public (middle) School. Rob holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Vanderbilt University and studied English and American Literature at Auburn University for postgraduate studies. He has three children and lives in Nashville, TN.

Contact information:
[email protected]

Matt Bridges

Program Director, Middle and East Tennessee

Matt is a Middle Tennessee native who joined the Music for Seniors team in 2013. He started with the organization as a Musician Partner and soon became an invaluable asset. Now a full-time staff member, he auditions, onboards and schedules all Musician Partners in the Nashville area, develops our marketing materials and works closely with our Knoxville Program Coordinator to oversee programming there.

Matt is a certified percussion facilitator through REMO’s Health Rhythms. He continues to offer his unique, hands-on and interactive “Rhythm Session” program for the seniors we serve, just as he has for many years for groups across Tennessee, including for children and adults with intellectual and developmental challenges. Focusing on the universal concept of natural rhythms in our everyday lives, participants play percussive instruments from around the world. As of Fall, 2019, he has facilitated well over 600 of these sessions and immersive percussion-focused workshops throughout the state, including as a Teaching Artist for our organization’s Percussion Learning Labs.
In addition to his direct work with our older adult participants in the field, Matt also trains our organization’s Musician Partners, empowering them to share our specialized Music Making Outreach Sessions. These unique sessions, tailored to the needs, tastes and sensibilities of our older adult participants, and created by Matt exclusively for Music for Seniors, are informed by his years of experience in the field of Creative Aging and spring from his love for musical communication and his passion for serving others.

Matt holds a B.A. in Counseling and Human Services from Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky, completing internships with Alzheimer’s Association of Middle Tennessee and Elmcroft Senior Living in Lebanon, Tennessee. In addition to working with Music for Seniors, Matt continues to write and perform with his rock and roll band, Flat Rock Revival and remains actively engaged in various other music projects, performing live and in the recording studio.

Contact information:
[email protected]

Sarah Martin McConnell

Founder

Sarah founded Music for Seniors in July, 2007. Under her leadership, her original concept – to enlist area musicians for live music outreach to older adults – has grown into a thriving 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Texas, Austin, Sarah earned her Bachelor of Arts cum laude in 1974. She earned a Master of Science, Social Work degree from the University of Tennessee, Nashville, in 1999.

A professional musician, singer and songwriter since 1976, Sarah’s accomplishments include solo performer as well as lead vocalist with various jazz and pop bands performing in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Nashville. She garnered national commercial credits as a jingle singer and SAG/Aftra actress and was twice featured as a “New Folk Artist” at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. Sarah’s songwriting credits include: Must I Fall (Walter Hyatt, “Music Town,”Sugar Hill Records) and The Standoff, and Reach for Me (Walter Hyatt, “Some Unfinished Business,” King Tears Music).

In 1984, she founded the for-profit company, The Caroling Troubadours, furnishing distinctive seasonal entertainment to retailers, hotels, corporations and private parties and at one time operating in four cities: Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Nashville.

As an independent contractor paralegal from 1986 through 2011, Sarah performed legal support work encompassing a wide variety of duties for firms in Dallas, Houston and Nashville, including the Nashville firms Neal & Harwell, Gullett Sanford Robinson & Martin, Baker Donelson and HCA Corporation.

Between 1997 and 1999, Sarah worked as the first Program Director for Magdalene, directing day-to-day operations and program development and implementation for this Nashville nonprofit, which housed and served women in recovery. In 2004, Sarah was certified as a Rule 31 Family Mediator.

In August, 2005, Hurricane Katrina blew Sarah’s 84-year-old mother, Marge (then recently diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s), from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Nashville, changing forever the course of Sarah’s personal and professional life by inspiring the launch of Music for Seniors.