Hear Your Song, Inc.

Hear Your Song empowers children and teens with serious illnesses and complex health needs to make their voices heard through collaborative songwriting.

The Elevate Prize would fuel Hear Your Song's expansion of our collaborative songwriting programming, allowing us to reach many more children and teens with serious illnesses and complex health needs, regardless of geography, through both our virtual and in-person models. It would also provide the resources to deepen our outreach to communities of kids who are often overlooked in pediatric arts/empowerment programming, like nonverbal children, kids most comfortable expressing themselves in languages other than English, and kids with diagnoses that predominantly impact communities of color.

Funding would also support the continued growth of our local student-led chapters throughout the U.S. and beyond. We could deliver more extensive trauma-informed care and pediatric health equity training and mentoring to a greater number of undergraduate leaders who forge organizational partnerships and collaborate with kids in their own communities. 

Since a critical part of our mission is sharing and celebrating kids' songs—striving to impact the way that our audiences perceive sick kids' creative capacities—the amplification of our work would also be transformational for us and the kids whose voices we elevate.

My co-founder Rebecca Brudner and I launched Hear Your Song as an undergraduate organization at Yale University in 2014, hoping to create a community of student musicians who would use their talents to empower hospitalized kids to create their own songs about anything they wanted.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that it was more important than ever to amplify the voices of medically vulnerable kids and to create opportunities for them to define themselves on their own terms.

We immediately began expanding Hear Your Song into a national nonprofit with virtual programming for children and teens experiencing chronic health needs, either in hospitals or at home.

Hear Your Song has now recorded 150+ songs written by kids in 14 states, while supporting six campus-based chapters, engaging hundreds of volunteer musicians around the globe, and building twelve partnerships with children's hospitals, specialized schools/camps, and other nonprofits.

We want to bring Hear Your Song to communities and pediatric organizations throughout the United States—and beyond—empowering kids with serious illnesses to share their stories through song regardless of language, neurodivergence, or any other factor that might leave their voices unheard.

In the United States alone, 27,000 children and teens annually receive diagnoses of life-threatening illnesses, experiencing treatments and recoveries that often leave them isolated and unheard. Kids living with serious illnesses need the chance to show the world—and sometimes show themselves—that they are more than their diagnoses. Hear Your Song shakes up the narrative about who sick children are and can be by letting kids take control of their stories and share whatever part of themselves—whether their love for summer camp or their obsession with pasta—they want to lift into music.

WE CREATE: Supported by volunteers in live songwriting sessions, children and teens write their own song lyrics which are then set to music and professionally recorded, based on the songwriter's ideas for melody, musical style, instrumentation and tempo.

WE MENTOR: Hear Your Song trains and mentors undergraduate leaders who collaborate with medically fragile youth through organizational partnerships local to their communities.

WE AMPLIFY: Hear Your Song shares the extraordinary songs that kids create in order to celebrate each songwriter's storytelling, passion, and imagination. We aim to shift public perception of sick kids by building a humanizing digital platform powered by the kids' own words and musical ideas.

We believe that what makes Hear Your Song most innovative and special is our commitment to following each young songwriter's imagination and creativity wherever they lead. Flexibility is at the heart of all our programming—in designing each partnership, in shaping each songwriting session, and in producing each song.

We make each child's songwriting experience unique because every kid is unique: whether we're supporting

twelve-year-old Jackson, who knows all the elements of the periodic table by heart and wants to sing about every single one,

or nine-year-old Violet, who wants to turn the affirmations she recites to herself to combat anxiety into an anthem of self-belief featuring her own voice,

or seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter Will with his own home recording studio and a heartbreaking pop song ready to bring to life,

or fifteen-year-old Akeisha, who wrote her song in Spanish about her medical journey and then asked us to teach her mom to sing the melody so they could share the song together in her hospital room,

we're ready to meet every kid's needs in bringing their songs to life.

Our expansive volunteer community of musicians/composers, from high schoolers to pros, allows us to realize each kid's musical vision.

Throughout the pandemic, Hear Your Song has magnified our impact through successful virtual partnerships with other nonprofits, children's hospitals, and camp and school programs around the United States that allow for individualized flexibility for each participating kid and family.

Hear Your Song strives to shift public perceptions of kids experiencing serious illnesses by building a platform where children’s own words and musical ideas can demonstrate the fullness of their identity and the boundlessness of their creativity. Through our Project Amplify on social media, kids and families can connect in a public celebration with the composers and musicians who collaborated with them: in this space, the ever-expanding Hear Your Song community recognizes each child not for their medical fragility but for their artistry and imagination.

Our mentoring program for undergraduates has a ripple effect as student leaders train their classmates, sharing their skills and understanding of trauma-informed care while empowering kids in their local community. Many student volunteers plan to go into medicine, so we strive to equip these future doctors and health care professionals with a belief in the full humanity of their patients and in the power of music and storytelling to bring that humanity to light.