Camp Hear Your Song

What’s Hear Your Song?

Hear Your Song is a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young people living with chronic illnesses to make their voices heard through songwriting and music production! We’ve been a nonprofit organization for 6 years. We’re so proud of the 800+ youth songwriters who have created more than 1000 songs with us in those years with the support of over 500 extraordinary volunteer songwriting mentors, musicians, and lyric video creators.

At the heart of our work is an individualized, kid-driven process that puts every youth songwriter in the driver’s seat of a creative process that totally belongs to them. Hear Your Song gives POWER and CHOICE to young people who seldom have much of either power or choice in navigating their health care journeys.

While we’re a New York City-based organization, we love collaborating with youth songwriters virtually all over the US and beyond. That’s why our Camp connects songwriters from across the country.

All of our programs are completely free of charge.

To hear lots of the songs that youth songwriters have created, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Instagram.

There’s a lot of charities out there. Why should I support Hear Your Song?

There ARE a lot of amazing charities with a lot of need right now. We’ve been so humbled to hear from families — and our kids themselves — about the impact of Hear Your Song on young people’s lives. We know that, in the midst of the trauma of facing a chronic illness, having consistent, caring adults show up again and again for you can make all the difference. We’re proud to have been those adults for many of the youth songwriters in our community, mentors and friends that our wildly talented kids know they can depend on to be there for them and to be willing to listen to whatever they want to share.

For a long time, we’ve believed that musical collaboration between a child and a professional musician is an incredibly powerful act of demonstrating our shared humanity — when we set a kid’s lyric to music or help them hear the melody in their head aloud or inspire them to find the perfect beat or support them to feel comfortable singing on their own song, we’re letting them know that their words and perspective matter.

We’re also letting them know that they are artists deserving of being celebrated; they are so much more than just their diagnoses. 

One moment early on in our history as an organization,13-year-old Christopher was on his second song and, at the start of a Zoom session, he asked, “Why are Hear Your Song people always so happy?” It’s not a fluke: our staff and volunteers are always so happy because it’s endlessly joyful to see kids, as one mom put it recently, “step into their power” and tell their stories on their own terms. We’re always surprised, we’re always delighted, we’re always grateful to do this whimsical, wondrous work.

What if I have more questions?

Email your questions to hys@hearyoursong.org or DM us @hearyoursonghyson Instagram.