Our Story
What Is Hear Your Song?
Hear Your Song, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that empowers children and teens with serious illnesses and complex health needs to make their voices heard through songwriting and music prdouction. Hear Your Song provides power and choice—and a microphone—to young people with a wide range of diagnoses, both physical and mental health conditions, that so often deprive them of both power and choice in their day-to-day lives. At Hear Your Song, we believe that every young person deserves the chance to define themselves on their own terms.
In kid-driven, trauma-informed songwriting sessions, Hear Your Song volunteers work with youth participants to guide them through the process of writing their own songs about anything they want, from loving pasta to living with epilepsy. The songwriting process is totally up to every youth songwriter: they can choose to write lyrics, compose their own melodies, build their own beats, produce their own tracks, record their own vocals and instrumentals, and even produce their own lyric videos. Our staff and volunteers support them as mentors and collaborators every step of the way, ensuring that we bring every song to life exactly as the youth songwriter imagined it.
Hear Your Song partners with pediatric hospitals, camps, schools, and other nonprofit programs that serve kids experiencing serious illnesses and complex health needs. Hear Your Song is always happy to support youth songwriters who use assistive or augmentative technology to communicate.
All of our programs are available to our families and partner organizations free of charge.
Our History
One night in May 2014, a group of friends at Yale University crowded into a tiny studio to record a few songs: “The Cow Dances With Her Arms,” “A Warm Place,” and “Simba And I Are Not Friends (Just Kidding!).” These songs, with lyrics by Maria, Melissa, and Justice, pediatric residents at Elizabeth Seton Children’s in Yonkers, NY, marked the beginning of Hear Your Song’s adventures.
Dan Rubins and Rebecca Brudner co-founded Hear Your Song as a student organization when they were sophomores at Yale University. Hear Your Song’s first partnerships were with Elizabeth Seton Children’s in Yonkers, NY and Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital. Dan received the Yale-Jefferson Award for Public Service in 2016 for Hear Your Song.
In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, Dan and Rebecca recognized that sick and immunocompromised kids needed a platform to share their stories and make their voices heard more than ever. That spring and summer, Hear Your Song began its national expansion, launching a virtual program model and building new campus-based chapters and partnerships.
In the years that followed, Hear Your Song grew as a hybrid organization, meeting the varied needs of kids with chronic illnesses, including ongoing virtual programming for youth songwriters around the United States and beyond, as well as intensive in-person partnerships with children’s hospitals and specialized schools (including New York Presbyterian—Brooklyn Methodist, Montefiore Einstein, and the NYC Department of Education’s Hospital Schools program), medical specialty summer camps (including Double H Ranch Camp, Camp AmeriKids, and Hole in the Wall Gang Camp), and pediatric nursing homes.
In 2023, Hear Your Song won the OneGroup Innovation Award at the NYC Imagine Awards in recognition of our groundbreaking programming.
In 2024, Hear Your Song launched Duet-A-Doc, a program that allows youth songwriters to invite their long-term doctors to collaborate on original songs with them, “flipping the script” on the traditional pediatric patient-doctor relationship.
And in 2026, Hear Your Song inaugurated Camp Hear Your Song, a multi-day workshop for youth songwriters and their parents in partnership with BerkleeNYC’s Power Station studio.
Hear Your Song has now recorded well over 1,000 songs by children and teens with serious illnesses. In their songs, the young songwriters write about whatever they want to share, whether it’s their passion for the periodic table or pasta or the holidays, their love for their friends or family or camp, or their worries, dreams, challenges, and big imaginations.
Our Volunteers
Hear Your Song thrives through our rich community of hundreds of volunteers who mentor youth songwriters, produce music behind the scenes, record vocals and instrumentals, and produce lyric videos.
Hear Your Song’s campus-based chapters now include Yale University, Wellesley College, Northeastern University, and UC-Davis. Campus-based chapters receive training, mentorship, and operational support as they produce their own songs and facilitate songwriting sessions.
In order to best meet the needs of every kid as well as the volunteers who serve them, we are committed to providing all volunteers who lead songwriting sessions with trauma-informed care training.