Finding “Home” in Changing Times

By Audrey Maxner

The Lewis Prize for Music, a philanthropic music arts organization launched in 2017 to drive equitable systems change through musical arts, recently released the Wholistic Homecomings Essay Series. This essay series features writings by The Lewis Prize for Music’s 2021 Accelerator Awardees and explores the ways these organizations have highlighted the importance of homecoming amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2021 Accelerator Awardees are a cohort of creative youth development (CYD) organizations selected through a national prize process granting cycle. These awardees are the second cohort selected by The Lewis Prize for Music and were each identified for their continued work utilizing CYD as a vehicle to address inequitable systems, to uplift systems change, and to ensure young people have opportunities accessing transformative music learning. The 2021 Accelerator Awardees are Celina Miranda from Hyde Square Task Force, DeLashea Strawder from Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit (who we interviewed on the Why Change? podcast!), Matthew Kerr and Christopher Thornton from Beyond the Bars, and Susan Colangelo from Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective.

The Essays

The Wholistic Homecomings Essay Series asked each of the Accelerator Awardees to reflect on the variety of ways their organizations have recreated the concept of home over the past two years. In response, Colangelo, Miranda, Strawder, and Thornton illustrated how the definition and meaning of “home” has evolved for their organizations through the sharing of essays, poems, songs, and stories.

“Come Home” by Susan Colangelo is the first essay in the series. Colangelo begins by establishing the Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective as an organization: who it serves and what it does. She states, “the organization brings together professional artists and black youth ages 16-24 to create systemic social change. Story Stitchers is committed to placing youth at the center of the work” (6). Colangelo shows Story Stitchers’ presence in St. Louis City by outlining its work advocating for racial justice, providing opportunities for economic advancement to black artists and youth, challenging justice system inequities, addressing healthcare and education inequalities, and challenging civic systems for equality in education and employment. In all these initiatives, youth are the drivers and leaders in identifying both topics for exploration and methods for engagement. To demonstrate this youth leadership, Colangelo weaves the essay between the voices and words of youth artists from Story Stitchers and her own analysis of the challenges Story Stitchers is addressing. This includes quotes, excerpts of lyrics from the Story Stitchers’ revolution song, and lyrics from a StitchCast Studio podcast. Through their words, a definition of “home” is formed. The youth speakers identify home as a safe space, a community, and a family, all of which can be found at Story Stitchers.

The second essay in the series is “Recreating a Sense of Home” by Celina Miranda. Miranda takes a storytelling approach to her essay, bringing the reader along her journey of how her home was disrupted by the pandemic and adapted in response. She initially defines “home” as the physical building of Hyde Square Task Force, in which youth and staff shared a physical space where they “felt at ease and safe to be themselves” (11). But when the COVID-19 pandemic began and HSTF pivoted to a virtual delivery model, the organization needed to recreate its sense of home in new ways. Miranda outlines several questions HSTF tackled in the face of this challenge: how could HSTF continue showing up for its youth and their families in meaningful ways? How could it uphold the feeling of home? How could it continue to be the safe place where youth could “let go and be themselves without reservation?” (11). “Home” became about finding new ways of building community, connection, and systems of support. In the initial year of the pandemic, this included distributing critical household needs to financially vulnerable households, offering youth social emotional support and Self-Care Kits, and distributing equipment to decrease barriers to participation in virtual programming. As programming transitions back to being in-person, HSTF continues to remain flexible in finding ways to “keep meeting young people where they are at and create safe spaces (whether virtual or in-person) for quality and meaningful interactions . . . it is in this act of being together in safe and nurturing ways that we recreate the sense of home time and time again” (12).

DeLashea Strawder’s essay, “Where the heART Lives,” is the third in the series. Through a combination of storytelling and poetry, Strawder shows what “home” and Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit mean to her. The poem, which starts off the essay after a brief introduction, takes the reader through the perspectives of a 13-year-old girl struggling with ostracization and a 16-year-old boy facing heavy pressure, before landing into Strawder’s own reflections. She describes entering the arts field at 15-years-old, “after what felt like an eternity of being boxed in and voiceless” (14), and finding a safe space for self-exploration, autonomous decision-making, and affirmation within artmaking and the art that is created in Mosaic Theatre’s walls. Strawder then segues into the storytelling component of her essay. In this section, she elaborates further on how the COVID-19 pandemic removed youth from their community spaces in which they find safety, healing, and hope. In finding homecoming amidst the pandemic, Mosaic Theatre found innovative ways to continue connecting the Mosaic family and meeting them where they were. This included partnering with schools, teachers, and administrators in virtually creating music; providing equipment for distanced recording and streaming; and adapting unexpected locations into heART spaces – stages, gathering places, audio booths, and other places for creating art. For Strawder, this is home. She describes it as “the call back to the space where you feel most centered. Home is where the heART lives” (15). For Mosaic Theatre, this means co-creating and maintaining safe and brave spaces for youth and community to create within, regardless of where or how this might take shape.

The final essay in the Wholistic Homecoming Essay Series is “Bringing Together a Tapestry of Community” by Christopher Thornton. Thornton’s writing highlights Beyond the Bars, the power of music as a medium, and how community is formed within these two places. He describes music as “a space, an action, an experience, a connector” (16). It is the “third space within us” (17) that ties us to our community, our ancestors, and our stories. Understanding this, Thornton states that Beyond the Bars is more than a physical location; it is a tapestry of community. The organization serves as a “third or fourth home space” (16) where community partners, teachers, community leaders, young people, and their caretakers can engage in music together in a safe, encouraging, youth-driven environment. By cultivating these spaces at over thirty sites across Philadelphia, Beyond the Bars supports its community in connecting to the past and places that have previously been home; the present and the living creation of warmth, community, and action; and the future home spaces that are in the making.

My Thoughts

Reading through this series, I noticed two definitions of home recurring across the essays: safe space and connection. Although each writer and their respective organization faced challenges created or exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the drive to keep cultivating connections and offering safe spaces to their communities encouraged these organizations to reimagine unique and creative solutions. These stories show us that adaptivity and resilience are reached through interconnectedness and community. Key to building this community are interdependence, relationships, and the compassion that we hold for each other. To quote the words of writer, facilitator, and activist adrienne maree brown, “Relationship, quality relationship, may in fact be everything. To create a shift, we have to learn to be in authentic relationships with, to listen to, voices that are ‘on the ground.”

The writers of the Wholistic Homecomings Essay Series have chosen to listen. Beyond listening, they have chosen to decenter their own voices and to create new space for young artists’ voices to rise. The result is a celebration of what community can accomplish, and of what youth can accomplish, when given the tools to succeed.

I’ll leave you now with three questions: 

  1. As we continue forward through this pandemic and explore further ways of building community, whose voices do we need to hear? 

  2. How will we hold space and elevate those voices? 

  3. How much will we see them resonate?