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Farah understands the impact playing music can have on anyone, especially people with disabilities.

While his brothers played sports, Farah was stuck inside, unable to participate. “I never really felt like there was a place for me,” he said. But music was always something he loved, and he knew it was something he could work on.

“As someone with a disability, music saved my life,” he says. “It gave me an identity.”

The idea to open the academy came last year when he had trouble finding work as a music teacher. “As soon as I mentioned the visual impaired, (potential employers) shut the whole thing down.”

Farah saw Ability Though Music as an opportunity to find himself work while giving back to the community.

When he began taking music lessons at age 12, his instructor at the time had trouble adapting to Farah’s vision impairment. He would grab Farah’s hands fumble them around the keys, adjusting their position. “They had no idea how to teach me.”

But his second teacher took a radically different approach: He began by familiarizing him with the instrument, teaching Farah the feel of the piano and its mechanics before he delved into theory and scales. It’s an approach Farah said he’s “stolen.”

Farah believes his firsthand experience in having to adapt around his disability gives him an edge in teaching others with disabilities to learn music.

“It’s about learning together,” he said, adding that the process of teaching requires both he and his students to work around other’s needs.