Home Street Music

Home Street Music was founded in 2017 by Austin-based songwriter Vanessa Lively, to bring the healing power of music, creative self-expression, and community to the unhoused population in Austin by organizing and hosting weekly music circles.  Over the course of the last 7 years, the pilot program has developed and evolved in partnership with Community First Village to include not just the music circles, but public events, performances, and workshops.  In that time, we’ve grown from a one-woman labor-of-love operation, to a fully actualized 501(c)(3) non-profit with an active board of directors and a roster of acclaimed songwriters.  Our programs have had an incredible healing and transformative impact on the participants we’ve reached, and we feel that our organizational foundation is built-out to the point that the time is right to begin expanding the programs reach into new underserved communities.

Home Street Music hosts inclusive weekly music circles at Community First Village for people who have experienced homelessness, and who are working to reintegrate their lives back to self-sufficiency.  For cohesion and continuity, we organize our individual music circles into eight-week seasons, with four seasons per year.  We’ve found that clustering the circles into seasons allows deeper community to develop among the group, and for individuals' comfort levels to grow, and for the free flow of personal expression to blossom.

Each music circle is led by a professional “lead” songwriter, assisted by “co-lead” musician, and backed-up by a mental health professional (in partnership with the SIMS Foundation) to help monitor and mediate any strong feelings which might arise in the sharing of music together.  The weekly program for each circle is fluid and variable, largely group-led, facilitated by the lead songwriter.  It can include a combination of the group singing and playing old well-known favorite songs together, an individual sharing a song they have written themselves, and the group writing a song together to share in the collective experience of creative expression.

Each of these brings its own virtues to the individual participants, and to the community as a whole.  Sharing old favorite songs together helps everyone feel comfortable and at-home in a way that only a beloved song can, sometimes.  Sharing their own songs can give the participants a platform and spotlight to be seen and heard among their community in a way that the unhoused are very rarely afforded.  And writing songs together as a group gives each individual a voice among the circle of their peers, while also giving the collective group a unified voice with which to share their perspective with the outer world.  We’ve found that experience to be transformative and empowering to people who have largely felt the power of their voice diminished by the isolation of homelessness.

Participants in our programs can partake in as many or few of the circles’ activities as they feel comfortable.  Some just watch and listen.  Some take part in the music-making (and merry-making) at every level.  Participants aren’t required to commit to an entire season, but we’ve found that most individuals who attend one of the circles become regulars at most of the circles.

The feedback we’ve received from the participants of our circles (and the feedback from our community partners at Community First Village) has been extremely strong.  So much so, that the feedback is what’s fueled the growth and development of our whole program.  For many of our participants, these regular musical gatherings have become an essential component of their healing and restorative dignity.

In addition to the weekly music circles, we’ve begun to expand our program to include Community Concert Events, Workshops, and Paid Performances with other entities . . .

Our Community Concert Events are quarterly events that we organize ourselves, and which serve several worthy goals.  They shine a bright outreach spotlight onto Home Street, to let the greater Austin community know about the work we’re doing.  They give the music circle participants a group goal to work towards, as the group builds a performance repertoire to present to the public.  And the concerts are great fund raising opportunities, both for the organization and for the individual participants. We’re unwavering in our commitment to pay each participant a fair rate for their contribution at each concert event.

The Workshops, thus far, have coincided with our concert events.  We try to dovetail the theme of each concert with a workshop which complements that theme.  For instance, the theme of one of our concert events was “La Voz Latina” — and the accompanying program was a Vocal Workshop focussed on each individual finding the power of their own voice.  Primarily, our workshop leaders have been well-established professional Austin musicians, but as our Home Street circle participants gain more experience and more confidence, we’re hoping to place them in co-lead positions in our Workshops, as well.  Besides the empowerment that comes with achieving a leadership role within the community, workshop leaders will, again, be paid a fair wage for their contributions.

Paid Performances are opportunities we’ve been cultivating for the “bands” that form from within our music circles.  These are paid gigs that the bands can play at commercial venues, private events, and non-traditional pop-up venues.  We’ve found that the bands have been hired mostly because they’re legitimately great — they have incredible spirit and energy, genuine musical talent, and they’ve worked hard to be musically cohesive.  Again, each participant is paid a fair wage.  And these performances have as spiritually rewarding as financially rewarding.

We will continue to expand and evolve our programming to reach more people, and to further enrich and empower our participants.