In addition to being an active performer, Patrick also has a diverse background as a teaching artist, scholar, and administrator. His passion for community engagement began as a freshman at Juilliard when he co-founded the Arusha Arts Initiative, an organization that has continued to lead arts empowerment workshops in Tanzania since 2009. Since then, he has been a teaching fellow in Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program, led arts empowerment workshops in New Orleans and Tunisia, and most recently was a fellow of the Silk Road Project as part of their education program at a New York City public middle school. In 2012 he received both the Joseph W. Polisi Prize for exemplifying the Juilliard School’s values of the ‘artist as citizen’ and the McGraw-Hill Robert Sherman Prize for education and community outreach, and in 2013 developed a workshop on using music therapeutically for post-traumatic stress disorder in collaboration with doctors at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell.
In addition to his work with young learners Patrick is also dedicated to lifelong learning, and for the past few years has been studying Arabic at Columbia University. In 2013 he received at U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic for two months in Rabat, Morocco, and continues to study Arabic on his own and actively follows the Arabic music scene in New York city.