Hear Your Song, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers children and teens living with serious illnesses and complex health needs to make their voices heard through songwriting.  In kid-driven, trauma-informed songwriting sessions, Hear Your Song volunteers work with youth participants to support them through the process of writing their own songs about anything they want, from loving pasta to living with sickle cell. 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 agency 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.

Hear Your Song partners with pediatric hospitals, camps, schools, and other nonprofit programs that serve kids with complex health needs. We also run our own programming, which includes Peer Songwriting Group for youth songwriters who want to develop their creative voices over a longer period and collaborate with one another; Peer Production Group for kids who want to learn about recording, mixing, mastering, and using production software like Logic; and Duet-a-Doc, a unique program in which youth songwriters get to collaborate on a song with their doctors, redefining and strengthening the doctor-patient relationship.

There is no “typical” Hear Your Song process, because there is no “typical” Hear Your Song kid. Some kids work for many months on every aspect of their songs, from lyrics to recording to mixing. Others work for one or two sessions on writing lyrics and leave the rest up to our team of volunteer composers and musicians. Our mission is to show up for each kid and meet them exactly where they are.