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Songs of Hope

Website: www.soundsofhope.org

Introduction

Songs of Hope is an international performing arts camp founded in 1991. In a unique spin on traditional summer camp formats, the Songs of Hope project's sponsoring organization, the Minnesota nonprofit organization, Sounds of Hope, Ltd. , intentionally assembles international delegations of young people aged 10-13 from countries worldwide to create a global community within the camp. Campers from the United States and countries worldwide join the country delegations and participate in a program of cultural sharing. The country delegations are partly subsidized by corporate and foundation donors. The Songs of Hope project also emphasizes performance, with its campers presenting a three-week concert tour at the end of each summer’s six-week session, reaching audiences numbering in the thousands with performances celebrating world cultures and global unity.

Serving Audiences and Low-Income Youth

In these two respects, the nonprofit Songs of Hope project differs from most summer camp types. Through its donors, including state and federal funding agencies such as the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders such as the Travelers Foundation and General Mills Foundation, the project partly subsidizes not only the country delegations, but also the participation of a number of low-income U.S. and international participants. Donations from supporters also enable the organizers to present low-cost outreach concerts to audiences who have less access to global music or who live with disabilities that keep them from most live art events, such as the clients of Partnership Resources and Midway Training Services. This mission-driven feature of the project certainly takes Songs of Hope away from the commonly found models of commercial summer camp offerings.

History

The first Songs of Hope project took place in 1991. The project was the brainchild of City of Saint Paul, Minnesota residents, Jeanne Junge and Tom Surprenant. When they met, in 1987, Ms. Junge had a degree in acting and directing from the University of Minnesota, formal training in dance and voice, years of experience as a performing artist and as a Minnesota State Arts Board roster artist-in-the-schools, and an award-filled resume as a producer of the children’s recordings. Awards for the innovative Women of Courage series produced by Ms. Junge included two Parents' Choice Gold Seals and three American Library Association Notable Recordings. Though not an educator, Mr. Surprenant’s first work experience after college was as a staff member of the Dartmouth College Outward Bound School. This experience gave him a strong interest in experiential education. Both Junge and Surprenant had also traveled extensively.

Vision

Melding their backgrounds, Junge and Surprenant began dreaming up the framework of a project that reflected their passions for travel, cultural experiences, music, kids, and hands-on learning. Their dreams eventually led them to envision the Songs of Hope project. Their idea was to bring delegations of a boy and girl aged 10-13 from many countries worldwide in order to present an international concert to local audiences.

First Project

With help from Saint Paul Mayor, James Scheibel, Junge and Surprenant asked friends and community leaders, including Dick Cohen and Mark Dayton to be part of their first board of advisors or to make personal donations. They then set out to convince community philanthropists to help them turn their vision into reality. Simultaneously, they approached the committees of Saint Paul’s six international Sister Cities, again with Mayor Scheibel’s support, asking the committees’ members to organize delegations of young performers from Saint Paul’s Sister Cities in Japan, Italy, People's Republic of China, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and South Africa. Eventually, all the Sister Cities except Lawaiikamp, South Africa, sent youth delegations. Lawaiikamp, a Black Township from the era of Apartheid, was unable to participate for financial reasons. Junge and Surprenant also recruited twenty-one local youth to be part of the Songs of Hope project.

The boy-girl delegations from the five Sister Cities in five different countries also included one adult companion each. These adults joined the project to act as the children’s companions, interpreters, and chaperones. Sharing rooms together, the U.S. kids and the young performers from the international delegations lived in a dormitory at the College of St. Catherine, St. Paul. Rehearsals were held on the college campus. For financial reasons, only ten of the U.S. participants lived on site with the international delegations. The other eleven kids performed in the concert, but they commuted to and from rehearsals daily.

The first Songs of Hope project was three weeks long, culminating with a single concert on the stage of O’Shaughnessy Auditorium, College of St. Catherine. Almost as soon as Songs of Hope ended, Junge and Surprenant started thinking that they had to do another project. As it turned out, their second project in 1994 led to a third, and then to a fourth, and at last count to a string of fifteen summer projects in a row.

Songs of Hope Today

Songs of Hope remains a non-profit project with an emphasis not only on learning and exploring, but also very much on service to others. For the project’s audiences, the award-winning Songs of Hope concert tour every summer celebrates cultures and promotes global thinking through a program of songs and dances performed by the project’s participating children from countries and cultures around the world.

Awards and Accomplishments

Since 1991, the Songs of Hope project has performed more than four hundred concerts of varying lengths, ranging from full 90-minute shows to special 20-minute arts-in-service concerts. Total audiences now exceed 90,000. The first project in 1991 received an Award of Excellence from Sister Cities International and Reader’s Digest, Inc. It was later recognized with a Peacemaker Award for its service to local youth from the Office of the Minnesota Lieutenant Governor. In 2004, 2005, and 2008 the Presidential Coming Up Taller awards program recognized Songs of Hope and its youth leadership development program as semifinalists, an honor given to fifty top youth arts programs nationwide out of about 300 nominees annually. The Coming Up Taller awards are sponsored by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Songs of Hope has twice received an Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the NEA for separate legs of a long-term project to tour gradually down the Mississippi River piece by piece.