Why We Created the COVID-19 Community Response Fund

The Lewis Prize for Music was only two months past announcing its inaugural awards when the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders took effect. At the time, we were finalizing our internal evaluation and identifying lessons learned. We were excited to nearly double the timeframe of our process by opening the 2021 Accelerator Award letter of interest in late spring. 

This was still our plan even as we saw the immediate impact COVID-19 was having on all aspects of daily life. So the new application could be informed by the altered landscape, we sought to understand the effect the pandemic was having on the Creative Youth Development (CYD) field. By the last week of March, we’d engaged in conversations with awardees and received over 50 responses to a simple survey asking organizations to share how they were adapting as a result of the shutdown. 

We learned organizations were retooling their music programs for virtual delivery while attending to the academic, health and material needs of young people and their families. Many were pursuing technology solutions to assist young people with staying connected to virtual-school. Others were shifting their transportation and meal capacity toward food delivery. The most responsive were in daily or weekly contact with their families and launched fundraising efforts to provide direct cash support for those who were suddenly without work.

All the reasons The Lewis Prize focuses on the CYD music field were standing out. In the best of times, these organizations uniquely attend to young people’s creative and material well-being. By combining artistic training with access to mentorship, meals, transportation, mental health services and even housing, CYD organizations are practiced at providing a multi-faceted foundation for young people. 

We realized CYD’s holistic approach can be more widely seen and appreciated as a result of COVID-19. The social service aspects of CYD work have been ongoing in community-based arts education initiatives for generations. However, it has often been overlooked or viewed as secondary to the artistic activities by funders and the news media. The deep inequalities exacerbated by COVID-19 and efforts to contain it confirms the necessity of this side of CYD work.

We created the COVID-19 Community Response Fund to give immediate support to organizations adaptively and responsively sustaining the wellbeing of young people and to shine a spotlight on the essential nature of CYD’s multi-dimensional work. These organizations offer tools for self-expression which are all the more necessary in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and rightful calls for the elimination of systemic racism. Just as fundamentally, they provide pathways to employment and trusted relationships.  

We are inspired by our 32 new grant recipients as well as the more than 500 other applicants that we could not support. There are extraordinary people across the country devoting their lives to building up young people and their communities through musical mentorship, material and social support.

Of our grantees, many have annual budgets of less than $100,000, and two-thirds are led by people of color. Now more than ever, Creative Youth Development arts organizations are showing us all that they deserve immediate and long term support. We encourage others to seek out and contribute to the programs in their communities that combine arts learning with all forms of belonging and safety for their youth participants.

Dalouge Smith

CEO, The Lewis Prize for Music