This week’s 1 Million Cups at the Kauffman Foundation featured a local effort to provide musical instruments to disadvantaged youths and a startup offering insurance-validating automobile license plates.

Mike Meyer of Meyer Music discussed Band of Angels, his family business’s nonprofit partnership with WDAF-TV Fox 4 to collect used instruments for kids in financial need who want to participate in school band and orchestra programs.

Now in its fourth year, Band of Angels asks the public to donate used instruments to any of the Kansas City area’s three Meyer Music locations. There the instruments are cleaned and typically repaired by technicians, because “80 percent of what we get doesn’t work when we get it,” Meyer said.

After consulting with area schools, each instrument is then matched to a student in need. To date, Band of Angels has collected 1,300 instruments and has given away 800 of them to kids in 60 school districts within a 100-mile radius of Kansas City. The organization also helps kids to attend weeklong summer music camps on full scholarship.

“Our goal is to connect one kid to one instrument over a wide area …” Meyer said. “I wish we could help every single kid.”

International PROOF Systems at 1 Million Cups

Next in the spotlight was Rachel Hankerson from St. Louis, founder of International PROOF Systems and its PROOF Smart Tags, a computerized license plate system for automobiles that validates insurance, vehicle registration and allows for more efficient location of a vehicle in case of emergency.

The primary target customers for Proof Smart Tags are insurance companies, Hankerson said. The tags do away with the need for drivers to carry proof of car insurance, because the plates will determine “if you are insured or not,” she said.

“The monitoring system is embedded into the license plate …” Hankerson said. “Our goal is to be universal.”