Music for the rooms almost nothing else reaches

The first time Rachel Wei saw Lucy, at Canuck Place Children's Hospice, she mistook the oxygen tank on the six-year-old's back for a backpack. Her school choir was carolling. Lucy had three months left to live. She was wearing "the biggest smile I'd ever seen."

They played Twinkle Twinkle together. When Lucy giggled, Rachel says, "it was like hearing joy itself." Later, when Lucy barely had the energy to speak, she still smiled when Rachel played. "Music was our language."

“I couldn't add days to [her] life, but I could add a little life to her days.”

Rachel Wei

Rachel started playing at four and is now a pianist, flutist, violinist, a Young Steinway Artist, and a student at Stanford. She began playing at a seniors' home in Grade 3. What she noticed was which performances stayed with her: "small ones, in rooms where music reached people almost nothing else could."

Those two rooms turned into the Beacon of Music Foundation, a provincially registered, student-run initiative that brings music into senior homes and gives young musicians "a way to serve." Ten years on, it has organized more than 260 concerts and involved more than 1,000 volunteers.

She has also organized an annual benefit concert for Canuck Place Children's Hospice since she was 11. Together they have raised more than $101,000 for over 1,035 children with life-threatening illnesses and their families. She went back to Vancouver recently to organize the seventh.

The work has been noticed. She was named a Vancouver Canucks Community Hero, and nominated as an AFP Outstanding Youth Philanthropist and a 2026 YWCA Young Woman of Distinction. She mentions all that for one reason: "the awards opened more doors for us."

"Much of what stops us is small," she says: transport, instruments, sheet music. Getting past it, she says, is "the difference between playing for one home this month and three."