While the three projects highlighted below are very different, they all began the same way.
Someone noticed something their community needed and decided to act.
That idea is at the heart of The Gifford Foundation’s “What If…” Mini Grant program. Community change doesn’t always begin with a large organization, a professional grant writer, or a major initiative. Sometimes it begins with a coach who wants more kids to have a chance to play, an artist who knows music can bring strangers together, or a teenager who believes the young people around her deserve to be recognized.
The Magical Musical Squad: Spreading the Love
Longtime performing arts leaders Annette Adams-Brown and Marcia Hagan, are using music and theater to bring people together.
Through the Magical Musical Squad’s Spreading the Love project, Adams-Brown and Hagan are helping young people explore compassion, respect, relationships, and their own life experiences by turning these conversations into original songs and stories. Hagan helps transform their lyrics and writing into music, and the Squad then takes those performances beyond the rehearsal room to schools, senior facilities, veterans groups and other community spaces.
The goal is to create connections among people who might not otherwise meet.
And those connections are already happening. Adams-Brown has reached out to community groups she had never worked with before, while Squad members have found themselves in heartfelt conversations across generations and backgrounds, including one young participant who interviewed an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Through music and storytelling, young people aren’t simply performing for their community. They’re getting to know the people in it.
Learn more about the Magical Music Squad by visiting themagicalmusicalsquad.org.
Arst Sport Academy AAU Basketball: Making Room on the Team
Syracuse native, former collegiate and overseas player, and now varsity girls basketball coach, Love Nicholson sees sports as a way for young people to develop confidence, discipline, accountability, teamwork, and a sense of belonging. But she also knows that competitive AAU basketball can be expensive and hard for families to commit to, putting travel, competition, and potential college exposure out of reach for many young players.
Through her organization Arts Sports Academy (ASA) AAU Basketball, Nicholson is trying to change that by reducing barriers and providing more support to players and families.
With assistance from a “What If…” mini grant, ASA expanded from one varsity-level girls team to three teams serving girls from fifth through 12th grade. Players competed throughout New York, while the oldest athletes traveled to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. ASA also hosted its first Father’s Day Tournament, bringing teams from across Central New York together.
With this progress, issues with transportation and time and cost commitment from some players, and their families remain an issue. These hurdles have pushed Nicholson and her team to build more community partnerships and tap into other local resources.
Nicholson continues her efforts to grow the program and bring more opportunities to Syracuse kids to get in the game.
Learn more about ASA by visiting: www.artssportsacademy.com
Let Our Voices Echo: Celebrating Young Excellence
At 17, Samaia Goodrich already has years of community service behind her.
She began the Let Our Voices Echo (LOVE) Project as a third grader and has since organized projects supporting nursing home residents, families displaced by Hurricane Maria and other members of her community. Her latest idea started with another need she saw close to home: too many stories about young people in underserved communities focus on their struggles rather than their accomplishments.
To change the narrative, she embarked on creatin the LOVE Youth Awards to recognize young people for achievement in academics, arts, athletics, service, and unity. The original plan was to honor 35 students. Then the nominations came in.
Goodrich and her team ultimately found additional sponsors so they could recognize 39 young people, mostly from the City of Syracuse. Goodrich and her team of event planners expected 125 people to attend. Ultimately, more than 150 showed up, indicating that the community agreed with her, Syracuse’s young people deserve to be recognized for their accomplishments.
Students shared their stories and hopes for the future while families, educators, community leaders and youth-serving organizations gathered to celebrate them. For Goodrich, seeing so many young people together was particularly meaningful. Some, like her, had just graduated from high school; others were younger. She described the gathering as feeling like one generation was “passing the torch” to the next.
The experience also taught Goodrich and her fellow LOVE project peers lessons in budgeting, problem-solving, and fortitude as they navigated unexpected logistics issues and limited resources.
Most importantly, it gave dozens of young people a room full of people saying: We see you. What you are doing matters.
