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 collaborative songwriting. 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. Youth songwriters write all their own lyrics and generate ideas for musical style, instrumentation, and tempo. Volunteer composers and musicians then use those ideas to set the words to music and record the song exactly as the songwriter imagined it to be heard, celebrated and shared. Some youth songwriters just write their lyrics and others choose to sing on the recording themselves and to compose and produce their own music — the journey is up to them!
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’s volunteers collaborate with kids through campus-based chapters and at the organization’s national level. 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.
Hear Your Song has now recorded well over 300 songs with lyrics 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 Chapters
Hear Your Song’s campus-based chapters now include Yale University, Arizona State University, Wellesley College, and CUNY Hunter College. Campus-based chapters receive training, mentorship, and operational support as they build their own local partnerships with children’s hospitals and collaborate with children and teens in their communities. 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.