Songwriting Works Educational Foundation

Songwriting Works™ provides music-making experiences that turn loneliness into connection, depression into happiness, and illness into health. Our award-winning songs and songwriting processes bust through doubt, disease, prejudice and denial, uplifting individuals and communities.

Professional musicians bring their skills into service using music to transform and empower: Strangers become musical collaborators, neighbors become friends. Those who never dared sing before - or who have been left out or silenced because of their circumstances - find their creative voices and are celebrated. Those who have been playing and singing for years find gratifying ways to bring their skills into service.

Through workshops, performances, recordings, video projects and community events, elder and younger folks, families and old and new friends meet in powerful musical adventures that reveal how creative we are - regardless of age, health or other circumstances.

SW participants-turned-composers include people who are living with Alzheimer's and dementia, Parkinson's, chronic illness, depression, stress, isolation, grief and other life challenges. We work in schools, communities and care settings. Our aim is to give each person new ways to bring their wit, humor, history, melodies, rhythms, insights and creative intelligence into these original, collectively composed songs. Families and neighbors join in together.
Once songs are complete, we all celebrate, sharing the music and honoring the composers and their communities in concerts, recordings, scholarly publications and radio, television, film, and internet broadcasts.
These memorable, singable songs reflect the whole community and continue on as part of the communities that create them.

We compose songs and lift our voices and....
Joy, hope and wellness are restored.
Relationships and community strengthen.
Stigmas dissolve.
Attitudes transform.
Participants and audiences gain courage.
Hearts lighten as families gain a wider sense of what is possible for their loved ones and themselves.
Teachers and students are inspired.
New vistas open.
Songs are written that last more than a lifetime.