DELMAR — Jill Rifkin is a sort of Robin Hood for musical instruments.

She collects them from often well-off kids who don’t use them and redistributes them to children who can’t afford them.

Rifkin was hooked, she says, by a little boy from the Caribbean.

“He didn’t speak much English, was desperate to play the violin, and his school did not have enough violins to give him … He was lonely,” Rifkin says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

After the boy was given a violin, he became good at it.

“Within a year — bingo!” said Rifkin. He had friends and was nominated for an honors orchestra.

“He turned from a very sad little boy to a fulfilled and happy little boy,” she said. “That did it for me. And I wanted desperately to help.”

Rifkin has run the Instruments for Students Program for nine years as a member of Vanguard, which she describes as a volunteer wing of the Albany Symphony Orchestra.

She says the musical instruments are also instruments for change, giving children “a way to express themselves, to belong, to contribute to this new society.”

Rifkin has collected and redistributed over 550 instruments “and I want a thousand,” she said. “I’m very greedy.”

She calls on various local organizations to co-sponsor instrument drives. The first one was at the Bethlehem Public Library. She had expected 10 instruments at most.

“We were deluged with 45 of them,” said Rifkin. “My living room looked like Wal-Mart the week before Christmas.”

Rifkin has partnered with libraries, churches, synagogues, a theater group, an art gallery, bookstores, and even a sweater shop.

So far, she’s had nearly 30 co-sponsors and more events are scheduled. People can also call her directly, at 518-439-1843 or email her if they want to donate an instrument.

All of her life, Rifkin said, not just with music, she has been concerned about opportunities for others.

“The inequities in our society break my heart,” she said.

Rifkin grew up in Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City, and says she “always cared deeply about poor people.”

She’s also long cared about music. When she was 10, she was taken to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore.” “I think my mother got me the record and,” she said, “within a week, I could sing all the songs.”

Her passions at school were singing and writing. Rifkin played the guitar and said, “My friends and I could harmonize pretty well so we’d all get together on Saturday nights and sing. My hero is Pete Seeger.”

Rifkin sang folk songs popularized by Seeger along with his songs of peace and protest.

“I really began to care very much about people who didn’t have all sorts of advantages that, frankly, I have,” she said. “That is so unfair … and I really wanted to do something about it and I did, through other parts of my life.”

Rifkin has tutored elementary school children in Arbor Hill. “If you can’t read very well, you’ve got a handicap for the rest of your life,” she said.

Rifkin herself has always loved poetry. “I used to sit on my father’s lap and we read poetry together,” she said. “I’ve liked it all my life. I can thank him for that.”

 Rifkin read the Arbor Hill students poems by Langston Hughes about rain. “They were mesmerized because it was beautiful,” she said.

And then she had them write their own poems. “And I cried,” said Rifkin. “Many of them were absolutely beautiful. And I was so proud of them.”

Rifkin, as a student at Skidmore College, had thought she would become a teacher but she discovered she liked working with people one-on-one and eventually set up a 30-year business that did just that.

But first, she became a newspaper reporter, working for a weekly in New York City. She liked interviewing people, “just hearing what they had to say.”

She loved living in New York City, on Roosevelt Island, with her husband and children but moved upstate, to Bethlehem, because of her husband’s job and found new pleasures here. Besides Albany’s symphony orchestra, she enjoys other cultural opportunities as well as the deer in her backyard.

The couple have been married for 52 years and Rifkin says, although they are different — she is outgoing and he is contemplative — “we have exactly the same morals and interests.”

Rifkin earned a master’s degree in counseling and, when it came time for her daughter and her friends to apply to college, Rifkin used those skills to find the right matches.

She eventually started a business, College Options, in which, over several decades, she advised more than 460 students and personally visited 480 schools all over the country. She says there is so much more to every student than their SAT scores or grades.

“What I was trying to learn was: What makes them special, what makes them happy?” she said.

Rifkin put her counseling degree to work not just with her student clients but with their parents as well. “You do have to be a little bit of a psychologist,” she said, “to both motivate some of the kids and calm the parents down.”

Rifkin closed with this advice: “Think about others aside from your own families. Volunteer work is so good for people. It helps the person who’s doing it as much as the recipients.”

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Three musical instrument drives are scheduled for this spring: March 12, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, at the Delmar Reformed Church, 386 Delaware Ave., Delmar; April 1, from 11 a.m to 2 p.m., at the Voorheesville Public Library, 51 School St., Voorheesville; and April 15, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., at Honest Weight Food Co-op, 100 Watervliet Ave., Albany.