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The challenges of climatic changes, the destiny of our planet, the possibility for new generations to take their future in their hands—these very big ideas inspired my colleague Magali Thomas and me to write a new opera for young people.

When a dedicated youth music organization starts brainstorming, the sky opens with possibilities. Such was the lead-up to the creation of KidComposers, a natural extension of OrKidstra’s online Improv Explorers program.

During our conversations with them, CMW staff shared that they sometimes struggle to engage families to attend concerts. In considering how best to bring together all CMW families, students, and faculty, we came up with “Reunion,” an imagined concert designed to help CMW unite and celebrate their community’s many cultures and people.

We do not accept the normalization of school gun violence in our country. As an organization, we commit to fighting against gun violence to ensure safe spaces for students to grow and learn and blossom. We also commit to supporting the field through providing trauma-informed training to teachers, cultivating youth leadership and voice, and advocating for equity in music education on the national level.

Recently, we have created an initiative whereby dedicated musicians from Germany fly to Namibia at regular intervals for the next five to six years to pass on their pedagogical knowledge to the YONA music teacher team. The initiative is already up and running; we recruited the German teachers by selecting them from different European music education programs.

In 2020, amid a global pandemic and an extended and overdue reckoning with systemic racism in America, the Black Teaching Artist Lab was born. Founder Melissa Parke had been thinking about the idea since 2019, and she launched the organization at a time when many teaching artists were interrogating their own practices for the first time.

Music students from many regions, coming together across distances to spend days of intensive music-making together—around the world, this has long been one of El Sistema’s most famous and valued traditions. For the past two pandemic years, that tradition has been largely shut down.

But it’s beginning to come to life again.

Through a collaborative “Orchestra and Choir of Hope,” children from Branko Pešić get to perform with peers from two music schools with whom MAP cooperates. But Music of Hope leaders realized the students had multiple needs—they were hungry, both emotionally and literally.

Our group was inspired to see the singers shine while performing for their families and communities and saw an opportunity to celebrate their empowered selves in our imagined participatory concert, “We Are the Change.” Based on the lyric poetry book Change Sings by inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, the concert melds aspects of choral music and teaching artistry to create an engaging, out-of-the-box community experience.

Music for social change is a field with enormous potential, yet one that has not been fully realized because of a central paradox: a common reliance on musical and educational practices that have little to do with social change.