“At the start of the pandemic, my co-founder and I realized that it was the opportunity to really start expanding this mission to help kids with serious illnesses have the power and choice through a creative process that they so often don't get to have in their daily lives,” shares Dan Rubins. Dan is the co-founder and executive director of Hear Your Song, a non-profit organization empowering kids with serious health conditions to make their voices heard through collaborative songwriting. Today, Dan joins host Tiffany Zehara to talk about how the organization got started and how it works to empower kids globally.

Kids with severe illnesses and diseases lose a lot of agency over their own lives. They may spend a lot of time inpatient in hospitals and don’t have as much opportunity to express themselves creatively as other kids. Hear Your Song gives kids an opportunity to be involved in every step of the song creation process from lyrics and vocals to beats and instruments. It also provides an online community so that kids and their families can feel more connected. 

Music can be incredibly healing, but the creation of music itself also provides an opportunity for empowerment. Tune into today’s episode of Humanitarian Entrepreneur Podcast for a talk with special guest Dan Rubins to learn more about the work Hear Your Song is doing to improve the lives of children with serious and chronic illnesses. 

Quotes

• “At the start of the pandemic, my co-founder and I realized that it was the opportunity to really start expanding this mission to help kids with serious illnesses have the power and choice through a creative process that they so often don't get to have in their daily lives.” (3:28-3:46 | Dan)
• “It's really all about giving kids as many choices and as much control of every step of the process as we possibly can.” (7:10-7:18 | Dan)
• “We're hoping to this year take on some more multilingual partnerships as well, because that's something we're really excited about giving kids the opportunity to write songs in whatever language they feel most comfortable in.” (8:14-8:26 | Dan)
• “One of the things that's been wonderful on the community side has been really getting to know kids and families and bringing them together in ways that we would probably never have thought of if we were working purely in person.” (12:22-12:36 | Dan)
• “We also have what we call Cheer Your Song showcases where we have kids sharing their song virtually live with some of the volunteers who worked on their song. And we invite big audiences to watch that as well and put comments in the chat and sort of respond to kids songs and ask questions in real time. And those kinds of things have really been amazing for just making kids and families feel that they're part of a wider community. And a lot of kids listen to each other's songs, which is really cool. All the songs are up on our Youtube channel.” (13:05-13:40 | Dan)

Connect with Dan Rubins:

Website: hearyoursong.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hearyoursonghys

Instagram/Twitter/TikTok: @HearYourSongHYS

Youtube: www.youtube.com/hearyoursong

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/61cbxgJyTl1HTAkewAvTla?si=EUPInWLsTJ68E9h6-9kgpg

To connect with Tiffany to solve problems or affect the kind of change you want: https://calendly.com/humanitarianentrepreneur/discovery-call

Website:  https://humanitarian-entrepreneur.com 

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