THE PEACE OF HEART CHOIR INC

Our goal is to leave our audiences with a shared sense of the joy music can bring. We encourage audience participation and they sing along at our concerts. Our audiences may be reserved at first, but by the end we will have them clapping and singing with us; sometimes they even dance. Commonly, after a performance concludes, our singers often mingle with our audiences to bond with them.

We aim to expand the number of venues at which we perform, to increase our audience sizes and to obtain requests for return performances. We seek to continue performing more than 20 concerts per year, free-of-charge, and further spread our message of healing and community bonding.

We also aim to increase the number of choir members, ensure that the choir membership itself is diverse, and improve the quality of our performances.

To provide our audiences with a sense of joy, we carefully and collectively select uplifting music that reflects the diversity of our communities. We consider how our audiences will receive our music, including how familiar they might be with any particular song, as well as its artistic, historical, social, or political context.

Our music programs are also often tailored to an audience, for example, we might include more songs sung in Spanish when performing at a community center in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. In this way, we are able to bond with any given audience in a common language, while also respecting their traditions and culture. This also encourages audience participation.

We have a core group of more than 30 local venues in which we perform "outreach concerts," and we rotate among them annually. We publicize our availability through a variety of non-profit networks to enlist new venues.

To attract the widest possible diversity among singers, we also publicize our bi-annual audition process widely, via social media, non-profit/performance networks and traditional media, such as free public community access television.

In addition to those activities, in 2020 we also launched two broad public programs, such as "New York Sings Along" and our virtual "9/11 Concert for Hope," which helped the choir gain local, regional and national visibility, attracting online audiences and participation from individuals from across the US and around the globe.

To select music that is both uplifting and diverse, we conduct a democratic song selection process twice a year. All singer/members can make suggestions, those are given equal value, and then singer/members vote for the roster of songs for the repertoire of each season. By agreement, the repertoire must include songs of different cultures and languages. currently, the choir's repertoire includes songs in more than 20 languages from across the globe. This process contrasts with most other choirs, in which the musical director alone makes the song selections and sets the repertoire.

Our performance ability is supported by a wonderful musical director, Robert René Galván, who is supremely skilled as a performer in his own right during a prior career as a professional touring opera singer. For more than 20 years, Mr. Galván has been a choral master and conductor for choirs across the US. Not only does he provide weekly musical instruction in rehearsals of the choir, he also teaches music theory courses to choir members. Mr. Galván is responsible for planning and conducting all of the choir's musical endeavors, both live and virtual.

On the operational side, our volunteer singer/members manage both the long-term planning and the day-to-day functions of the choir. Among the membership, we have a wealth of professional talent among the membership who form a steering committee, including a number of lawyers, public relations and development executives, technology aficionados, educators and creative artists, and many others. These members devote much time and effort to the ongoing management of the choir, and have been collectively responsible for its upward trajectory during the past 20 years.

That volunteer committee is backed by a supportive Board of Directors, that has guided the choir and served as effective stewards of the choir's financial resources. The Board is a resolute partner and full partner with the membership, willing to roll up sleeves and pitch in as needed.

The choir began as a loosely organized small group of 12 singers devoted to helping NYC heal after Sept. 11, 2001. In the years that followed, the choir grew steadily and its organization evolved into a more professionally-run operation. Today the choir numbers about 50 volunteer singer/members from all walks of life, variously diverse and inclusive with members from many nations, cultures, ethnicities, religions, gender expressions, socio-economic status, and representing a spectrum of physical and cognitive abilities.

Here are just a few highlights from the past 20 years:
• We have performed more than 400 live outreach concerts and sung for thousands of New Yorkers.
• Our Facebook events and YouTube videos have been viewed by more than 600,000 people worldwide.
• Two of our recording are included in the permanent collection of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum; we have performed there many times, especially annual shows for 9/11 first responders and families.
• In 2018 the choir was invited to join 1,000 other singers for the historic live performance of "The Mile-Long Opera" on New York City's High Line, which was seen by thousands of viewers.
• In spring 2020, we produced "New York Sings Along," in which more than 100,000 people in NYC, across the US and around the world joined in song weekly to honor first responders and essential workers coping with Covid-19.
• For Sept. 11, 2020, we created a virtual program: "A 9/11 Concert for Hope," dedicated to healing and support for first responders of 9/11 and the current Covid-19 crisis.
• In the last few months of 2020, we have created thematic concert programs as online compilations of pre-recorded songs for a "Social Justice Show" and a "Winter 2020 Holiday Show."

What's next: The year 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and thus, is also the 20th anniversary of the choir's formation. Though our in-person activities have been severely inhibited by Covid-19, we hope to produce a major public concert on Sept. 11, 2021, as well as a new album in a recording studio, if conditions allow.