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Kids living with life-threatening and chronic illnesses need the chance to show the world — and sometimes to hear for themselves, too — that they are more than their diagnoses. Hear Your Song shakes up the stories about who sick children are and can be, by letting kids take control of the narrative and share whatever part of their life or imagination they want to lift into music.
At Hear Your Song, we empower kids with serious illnesses to write songs about anything and everything they want: from overcoming hurdles to their obsession with noodles! Once their song has been written, produced, and recorded, alongside volunteer musicians, it is theirs to listen to forever. We want as many people as possible to hear the songs that Hear Your Song's kids write: we strive 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 humanity and the boundlessness of their creativity.
Children with chronic and life-threatening illnesses will often be the last individuals in their communities to return safely to school and to see their friends and extended families in person. Hear Your Song provides a virtual outlet for the kids who have been especially isolated and at risk throughout the pandemic to express themselves and to tell their own stories on their own terms. Immunocompromised kids often experience long periods away from their friends and loved ones during normal times; those absences have only been multiplied and exacerbated by the pandemic. Support for Hear Your Song will allow us to continue to rapidly expand our virtual programming, regardless of geography, to amplify the voices of kids who may be largely forgotten as the rest of their communities reopen. We want to celebrate these children and teens and empower them to celebrate themselves for all that makes them extraordinary.
In live, collaborative songwriting sessions, Hear Your Song volunteers work with children and teens to guide them through the process of writing their own song lyrics. Using the kid songwriter’s ideas for musical style, melody, instrumentation, and tempo, volunteer composers and musicians then set those words to music and record the song to be heard, celebrated, and shared.
Beyond helping kids write their own lyrics, we support them to develop ideas for the melody, style, and instrumentation for their song. Next, our volunteer musicians make a professional recording of each song to be shared and celebrated. We follow each kid’s vision wherever it leads!
Hear Your Song also mentors student leaders at our campus-based chapters that include Yale University, Wellesley College, Smith College, Dartmouth College, and CUNY Hunter College. These student leaders facilitate songwriting sessions, coordinate partnerships with local children's hospitals, recruit and support volunteer session leaders, composers, and musicians on their campus, and take each kid and song through the entire process. Many Hear Your Song campus-based volunteers plan to go into the medical field, so we strive to equip these future doctors and health care professionals with a belief in the full humanity of each of their patients and in the power of music and storytelling to bring that humanity to light. We're also committed to providing all of our volunteers who work directly with kids with trauma-informed care training so that we can best support all the kids we serve.
The kids, ages 6-18, who participate in Hear Your Song's programming have a wide range of medical diagnoses, including mental health conditions, and we regularly adapt our programming for kids who are non-verbal and/or neurodivergent. We also strive to ensure that we are partnering with organizations that support kids in health communities and with diagnoses that are typically underserved by arts programs like ours.
Co-founders Dan Rubins and Rebecca Brudner started Hear Your Song as a student organization when they were sophomores at Yale University in 2014. They recruited a small band of fellow musicians to cram into a recording studio on campus to bring to life five songs written by kids at Elizabeth Seton Children's, a pediatric residence in Yonkers, NY, and went on to record dozens and dozens of songs written by kids there and at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital over the next years. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dan and Rebecca realized that it was more important than ever to amplify the voices of the kids served by Hear Your Song and to create opportunities for those brilliant young creators to define themselves on their own terms.
In response to the COVID crisis, they decided to do what they'd always wanted: to expand Hear Your Song into a fully-fledged nonprofit organization with virtual programming for children and teens across the country. Now, Hear Your Song has recorded 200+ songs written by kids through five campus-based chapters and a wide variety of partnerships with children's hospitals like Montefiore Medical Center, specialized schools and camps including Double H Ranch and Camp AmeriKids, and nonprofit organizations including MitoAction and the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation.
Last summer, we met 12-year-old Zippy at Double H Ranch Camp, and he shared his deep passion for pasta, working with Hear Your Song to write a song called "Noodles!" When Zippy came back to work with us again in February, he wanted to do something even bigger: write a mini-musical! The Adventure of Zippy Junior is the story of a zebra who flies to New York City to find his family and ends up in the cast of The Lion King on Broadway. Zippy himself identifies as a "Zebra," the official symbol of rare disease in the United States. After doctors discovered that Zippy's immune system was not functioning normally, he began receiving immunoglobulin infusions at age two to build up an artificial immune system. And a decade later, while PIDD is a lifelong genetic illness, Zippy is so much more than his diagnosis — for one thing, he's a musical theater writer and star of his own musical! But who would appear alongside Zippy? Hear Your Song reached out to six cast members of The Lion King on Broadway plus a performer from the Broadway cast of Dear Evan Hansen, another one of Zippy's favorite musicals. With the help of 25 volunteers in total — including video and audio producers and orchestrators and illustrators! — Hear Your Song brought Zippy's musical to life on video!
This past summer, we worked with over 70 kids at Camp AmeriKids, a week-long sleep-away camp that serves kids with sickle cell anemia and HIV. Two campers, Ish and Jared, wrote an incredible song called “Going Home,” in which they reflect on their feelings upon returning home from camp. We were fortunate enough to capture videos—posted on our Instagram—of Ish and Jared’s writing process, including them writing lyrics, coming up with the melody, and recording their own vocals. Ish even performed the song at the camp’s talent show in front of all the campers and staff! We were so impressed with Ish and Jared’s determination to write a song, produce it, and perform it in just 5 days!
We're committed to following each kid participant's imagination and creativity wherever it leads. Flexibility is at the heart of all of our programming: in designing each partnership to serve the organization and the diagnosis community we're serving, in facilitating each individual songwriting session at the pace and with the focus and activities that best meet each child's needs, and in the song production process where we pursue each young songwriter's personal vision. This flexibility and openness responds to the fact that every kid is unique: whether we're supporting the 12-year-old who writes a heavy metal song about ninjas for harpsichord and ukelele, or the nine-year-old who wants to write her song for piano and violin in Russian, or the 17-year-old with his own recording studio at home, we make it happen. Our expansive volunteer community of musicians and composers, ranging from high school students to pros, allows us to realize each kid's musical imaginings to the fullest extent possible.
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