Ok, so the number one running joke right now is likely to involve some variation of putting 2020 behind us. If you have been in any sort of contact with the planet Earth during the past twelve months, I don’t need to bore you with a list of the reasons.
But I do have to say that for Lost Voices it has not all been bad news. My Board of Directors asked me to put together a recap of the year for our annual meeting in November, and the exercise kind of opened my eyes. I thought I’d share a version of that report with all of you.
We started the year in our new Lost Voices office in PARC. For those of you who don’t know, our Board member Don Soenen donated a year’s rent to cover office space in the Plymouth Arts and Recreational Center – PARC – in downtown Plymouth. He also paid to prepare and furnish the space, so all we had to do is move in and go to work.
We had eight programs lined up for the year, our most aggressive schedule ever. We always need to schedule based on the calendars and circumstances of our client facilities, so the first three were clustered together in March and April. We also had four awareness and fundraising concerts scheduled in the first quarter, with many other events scheduled or in various stages of planning through the rest of the year.
In January we had a wonderful concert in Flint, at the Flint Institute of Music, with proceeds earmarked to fund three 2020 programs at the Whaley Children’s Center. In March we had a fantastic Concert in Ann Arbor with Ann Arbor Rotary at the First Presbyterian Church of Ann Arbor. We made a connection at this concert that resulted in Lost Voices becoming an affiliate charity for the 2021 Ann Arbor Marathon.
Then came COVID-19 and the lockdown.
We immediately had to postpone all our scheduled workshops, and began working on the concept of a Virtual Lost Voices. We were convinced that this new “Zoom” thing we were starting to hear about might hold some answers for us, if we could only figure out how it would work. The main issue was how to replace the Final Concert at the end of the Lost Voices week with something that could give the kids a similar sense of accomplishment and healing.
We also cancelled all those in-person awareness and fundraising concerts. It was pretty clear that it would be awhile before we could pack a crowd back into an auditorium again.
In May we decided to participate in “Giving Tuesday Now” by launching a “Giving Back Tuesday” campaign. We realized that everyone was suffering all sorts of trauma from the isolation and uncertainty we were all facing. We also realized that our core principle was helping people recover from trauma, and we had assembled a formidable team of experts in that field. The result was a Living with Trauma Roundtable Webinar leveraging the knowledge of our expert advisors.
We conducted our first test of the idea of using a version of our process to conduct virtual songwriting via Zoom. We invited supporters to sign up and participate in the writing of two group songs. You can read about that and hear the songs they came up with here.
We converted a Concert we had scheduled in cooperation with the First United Methodist Church: Whitmore Lake Campus into an online concert, and learned even more about doing music over the internet.
In response to the turmoil following the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we initiated a series of Webinars in conjunction with Unity of Ann Arbor titled “What’s Happening Now – a Frank Conversation on Racism.” Here are Part I, and Part II, and Part III.
We developed Virtual Lost Voices Kits to make it easier for youth to participate in our programs at various facilities where online technology is not readily available, and were proud to run our first Virtual Lost Voices program at Vista Maria. We discovered that a great alternative to the Lost Voices Final Concert was to produce a CD using crazy complicated methods of recording vocal instrumental tracks over the Web.
To cap off the year, we spent the week before Christmas conducting our first virtual Lost Voices program for Samaritas, working with kids in individual group foster homes. It is important to emphasize that bringing Lost Voices to these young people has only become possible because of our new virtual model – and by all the donors who made our purchase of the Virtual Lost Voices Technology possible.
So has 2020 been a year we would rather not have had to endure? Yes. But has a lot of good come out of it? Also, emphatically, yes.
Happy New Year, everyone.
