Support for this program is provided by the Weldon F Osborne Foundation.

The Schillhahn-Huskey Foundation.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

On today's show will feature two unique nonprofits.

One strives to share the transformative power of music and the other builds arts, experiences and connection in our community.

Stay tuned to learn more.

Welcome to Chattanooga's Stronger Together.

I'm your host, Barbara Marter.

We are pleased to have with us today Reed Caldwell, executive Director of Songbirds Foundation.

The organization connects kids with guitars and a love of music, and it all starts with a museum showcasing vintage and celebrity guitars.

Reed, thank you so much for being here with us today.

I really appreciate it.

I think we met about six years ago when you first came to Chattanooga to start this up.

Tell me why this songbirds is this foundation is so important to you and it's so important to this community?

Well, I think, you know, one of the one of the main reasons that we started this organization to begin with is because it seems that the arts and music are the first things cut in school systems.

And we all know that public schools are underfunded, especially in those areas.

So we decided to create a program where kids would have a hands on music education that would really cost the teacher nothing and cost the school nothing, and we would be able to provide them with this really in-depth because, you know, hands on is just so crucial to learning.

We the things that I remember from school were the things where somebody handed me a thing and I got to physically play with like an instrument or something like that.

So that's kind of the reason is to combat that declining trend in music and art education in schools.

Mm hmm.

So the guitars for Kids program is kind of an an overarching umbrella over several other programs that are kind of underneath that umbrella, which would be our Guitars in Schools program, which is what I'm talking about there, where we essentially we go and partner with school systems, then we recruit teachers within that system.

We train those teachers how to play guitar if they don't already play guitar.

Usually through about an 18 to 20 week training with the teacher.

Then we provide that teacher with all the equipment they need, the guitars, the bags, the picks and strings of all of our curriculum, our online learning portal.

And then they deliver our curriculum in their classrooms to their kids, and the guitars live there in the classroom.

We also have our partner program, which we partner with nonprofits and organizations all across the South, where we send our guitar teachers in to teach, to teach students directly.

And then we have our music therapy program under that umbrella as well.

Tell me about the music therapy.

So the music therapy is it's the coolest part, and I love this part of the program was kind of something that we we added on to the program the first year.

I had a friend who was a music therapist.

I think a lot of people don't understand what music therapy is.

I think they like they think it's like, Oh, you take a guitar, you go play guitar in a hospital with a kid who's sick, which we do some of that stuff.

But really what we're doing here is cognitive goal driven music therapy, where we're actively going into an organization.

We're partnering typically partnering with a physical therapist to accomplish a specific goal for a patient.

So, for example, if a kid has like a traumatic brain injury and they're trying to regain mobility in their head and neck, the music therapy therapist might go in and work with a physical therapist to help the kid really work through those kind of issues.

So it's always has a goal.

This kid has ADHD.

We're trying to get him to be able to sit still for a long extended amount of time or, you know, or this kid has whatever they whatever they're going through this, this helps them work through that issue.

So it's a really powerful program.

It's really cool to kind of see the kids grow and how fast I mean, I just I'm always shocked how fast the music therapy has an effect.

Even the physical therapists that we work with, some of them have said, wow, I just can't.

I can't.

We've been working with this patient for three months of physical therapy and we add the music therapy element on top of that and things really kind of progress so quickly.

I remember one time you were telling me about a young man that something about the use of his hands or something like that and doing that, it was just such a quick turnaround... That particular patient, he lost the use of his hands.

So he and I would play together.

I mean, I would I would go in with the physical with the physical therapist and the music therapist.

And then I would I would play the chords and he could strum.

And it was it was really great.

We we had this the nurses made us band shirts.

We were the four armed Bandit band and we had t shirts.

And it was it was great fun.

And I think it's a really good thing to kind of get kids minds off the, you know, what's going on with them at the time.

I think that helps.

I think also just all of it in a package just really helps kids really move through some really traumatic things that no one should have to go through.

Yeah, well, it's it's the mobility part of it, but it's the cognitive part.

It's where the brain is retraining itself, too.

And the old saying music soothes the savage soul.

It really does, because it helps to retrain the brain and rethink.

And I just I think it's amazing what music can do.

And I know when you mentioned, you know, the first thing, this cuts the arts in the schools and now you're trying to bring that back.

In the six years that you've been doing this, you're not just in Chattanooga now, are you?

You know, where have you expanded?

Well, we've it's been great.

We've had a really great outpouring of support from the local area, the regional area, the state level.

So a couple of years ago, maybe four years ago, we expanded across the state to Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, Cleveland and a couple of other places, smaller towns in between.

We also started kind of creeping down into Georgia.

We've got a bunch of schools and stuff in North Georgia all the way down in a room.

And then this year we partnered with Gibson Guitars.

We've been working on that partnership for four or five years and we finally solidified it.

This year.

We were able to purchase a thousand guitars two weeks ago, and that will help us expand to Mississippi, Alabama further into Georgia, Missouri and North Carolina.

So we're pretty excited about that.

We're able to really kind of replicate this program at a pretty fast rate.

It's a pretty portable program, a pretty affordable program.

And it's really great to see how how quickly it's easy to sum up what we do.

And then it's also really great to just it's easy to get the teachers trained to get the guitars there.

And it's just a really cool program and it's really portable and allowed us to really kind of, you know, export that Chattanooga music brand to the to the to the region and hopefully further as well.

I mean, how how does Mississippi and Florida and all of them hear about you?

Is it by word of mouth or is it by your website?

I mean, how are they learning about I think it's your program.

I think it's a combination of things.

I think that we've worked really hard over the past five or six years to create a lot of great content that would be on YouTube and in the museum.

Songbirds has become a nationally recognized brand.

I think people know that it's a thing and they they understand the museum and the guitars that we have.

We also have some really successful YouTube programs like the Vault Sessions, which where we interview, you know, artists that are coming through to play.

We're coupling our vintage guitars with them and they talk about and play those things, and that's become really popular.

I think people hear about it through that because at the end of all of those episodes, we talk about the Guitar for Kids program and what's happening.

We've gotten a lot of great news coverage and we have people every day call and they're like, Oh, I'm.

And we had people call from Alaska one on one on guitars.

And I just think, you know, it's great to see people wanting it.

And we just hope that at some point we can give guitars to whoever calls.

That's kind of that's kind of the ultimate goal, is to be able to spread this all the way across the nation.

But the thing of is it's not just giving the guitars, it's the whole plan preceding just the guitars is like the ribbon on top of the package and everything is what's inside the package.

A lot of like celebrity guitars have attempted to give away guitars in the past and not had a lot of success, mainly because they really don't have any way to track those guitars.

So say they're going to give out 100 guitar packages to kids.

They don't know if those guitars go to the kid and they get put under the bed or they get sold or they don't know what happens to them.

This program allows us to really track and monitor and know where the guitars are.

Really get feedback from those teachers in those schools like, Hey, this many kids went through the program.

We taught this many hours, this many music therapy hours, and we really know like, hey, this one guitar here did this many hours of education and was played this many times until it broke.

Or we had to pull it out of service to get serviced or whatever.

Yeah.

So, so you mentioned the museum and so museum has how many guitars in there?

There's we have about a 80 to 100 on display at any given time.

We've kind of changed the format of the museum a bit to really focus on great vintage guitars.

Of course, we have some celebrity guitars, we have some that are on one and we've got Duane Allman's 1961, Les Paul, which he played at Fillmore, which is amazing.

We've got Merle Travis's guitar, Chuck Berry's guitar, but we've also redone the museum to kind of focus on more hands on stuff, more interactive things where a family can come in, where someone who's a guitar nerd can come in and look at guitars all day long and their kids can enjoy the the pedals where you can go and, you know, click a button and hear what a guitar pedal sounds like through some certain amp.

Or you can play with the things to figure out how sound moves and works.

So we've really tried to create a more interactive family experience, but also still have that great vintage guitar thing that's really kind of always made.

Songbirds is this unique place, right?

So it's a it's interesting.

It's been a fun you couple of years redoing the music.

You kind of turn it into some more of a classroom type thing to where the Hamilton County students can come in and take a tour and learn and listen.

Like you just said, you've got a lot I noticed on your website, and I'd love to direct everybody to your website because it's so informative and there's a lot of just great information about all your different programs, but you've got a lot of musical events coming up, which I think is awesome for our community and everything and a variety of different kinds of music.

But you also you haven't mentioned it yet, but one thing I did notice is you have a radio hour on WUTC that's just recently started and everything.

What was the purpose in that?

It's a live recording of the We Do.

It's an hour long, obviously the Radio Hour and we bring in bands.

We talk about the power of music, kind of how they got their start.

We do an interview session with them.

Typically we have something historical to talk about, like we did one about Bessie Smith, and we had Dr. Michelle Scott, who wrote the definitive book on Bessie Smith, come in and talk.

And then we had Neshawn Calloway, who's local here, come and perform Bessie Smith tunes.

We've had Richard Lloyd, who is the the lead guitarist for the band Television, who was a huge proto punk band from the seventies, who kind of was the house band at CBGB's.

People come and you can kind of come to a taping and watch the watches, you know, tape come to just like this would be like sitting out here watching us do this.

It's well read.

You've got music in your blood, that's for sure.

Is your heart your passion.

You're excited about it.

And I think that's why you're so set, so successful with what you're doing.

So thank you so much for being with us.

Thanks for having us.

Appreciate that.

We'll be back in a moment with Kate Warren from Art 120.

Stay tuned.

We want to know how you serve your community.

Send us photos or videos of you or your family volunteering, and we may feature it on a future episode.

Email stronger at WTCI TV dot org or use the hashtag stronger WTCI on social media.

Welcome back.

Kate Warren is with us.

She's the founder of Art 120, which builds awareness between the community and artist, educators and nonprofits.

They offer free arts events in Hamilton County and provide teaching opportunities that embolden young people to express their creativity.

We're so happy to have Kate Warren here.

So welcome and thank you so much for being on the show.

You are the founder of Art 120 and you started it almost 13 years ago.

Tell me why you wanted to start a nonprofit, an arts nonprofit, because it's your passion and everything.

So I would love for you to share that with me.

Absolutely.

And I appreciate you giving me the time to do that.

So I love the city.

It lives and breathes art.

I couldn't wait to move here because I watched the whole carousel grow and everything else, and I knew I couldn't wait to get here.

My mom actually worked on the carousel quick side note.

So that's where we saw community art and bringing the arts together.

This town was just amazing.

So when I moved here from Houston, I couldn't wait to put my kid into elementary school, and that's when I found out there was a huge discrepancy in our school system at the time due to funding.

So they couldn't fund an art teacher in most of the schools, the PTA had to raise money to pay for that.

So out of 42 elementary schools that left 30 with no art program and I thought that's that's unacceptable because that's how kids learn that their ideas matter.

And there's so many different technical skills that can be built out of learning just how to draw.

So I knew coming from the art card capital of the world in Houston, Texas, that we drive art right into the schools.

And I said, We've got to do this.

We've got to do something about it.

So that's how we got started.

Wow.

And so fast forward 13 years later this June, you'll be celebrating 13 years.

What is what all did you bring to Chattanooga?

And with the arts and the culture and everything like that, what all programs do you offer?

Well, my my group is a bunch of creative problem solvers, so we use art to address needs in the community.

So when we started, the first need was the schools and then also summer programs for youth.

So the Urban Art program began where we could teach use art to teach kids to weld and technical skills.

And then as that built on and we were working in the Southside community, we got in touch with our Latin population and saw that there was a need for them.

And they have such rich culture in the Latin community that we started.

We started an event there.

It started with DIA de los Muertos, and we started that event and then used art again to help support and promote.

Then from there, we've just grown in a lot of different ways.

That has blossomed into our international market and more, where we have over 12 different countries usually represented or more.

And a lot of different groups to give immigrant and burgeoning populations access to art.

And then we bring in artists from around the country to continue to encourage kids, because now some of this effort has been a lot of advocacy.

Really, when you bring in art cars and you get to tell the story about how our our schools didn't have art, the word got out, I think.

And Hamilton County has been terrific.

Now, pretty much every school has an art program.

So now our artists come in and encourage kids to grow and make more of what they're doing.

We work with teachers to introduce the art teachers into adaptive manufacturing and technology, such as using digital laser cutters for art programs and projects so they can then feel comfortable going into their E lab through VW lab to create and make with their kids.

That just provides more access.

This is a lot of that.

It's just problem solving, looking at using art in our skills and what we have and how we can help bring the community into better engagement and also culturally connect our communities through our Jingle Truck program as we grow.

So it just keeps expanding from there where we see needs and we have capability, we we are determined to address it.

I think it's amazing for me to see, just in short, the short 13 years how you took an absence of art in the schools, which is like 42 schools or something like that.

There was no art teacher and now 13 years later, look at all you've accomplished not only in the schools but also culturally.

We are such a diverse community and we have so many cultures out there and you, music, artistry, dance, all of that.

It's the language that we all speak and that's what I love about it.

I know earlier we were talking, I love your column, The Bedazzled Cars.

I don't this the jewels that are precious looking.

I love those so you mention event is that coming up in May or something?

Yes.

So it's an annual event.

Of course.

COVID took us away for a couple of years.

And it is we make and it's an a celebrating youth achievement in the arts in partnership with Hamilton County.

But also we continue to bring in these other artists to engage the students, and we provide it.

We bring in also our international market so we can celebrate everybody at this event.

And we encourage people in the community, if they want to create or make something on wheels, that's you can check out a bike, you can take out a car, you can go to our website at WW w dot art 120 dot org and find out more information about that.

We always try to keep that up to date or our Facebook page always has the most up to date information on what's going on because we do a little bit of everything to engage the community.

Well, now that's your big event, but you have other events during the year, don't you?

Oh, yes.

We we do a lot of community placemaking in Chattanooga with the international market and more so with that event.

We provide opportunities so burgeoning artists and first generation Americans, people new to our country can share their culture and sell their their work.

Artists can sell their work.

We provide a very low bar of entry to that because we want those people to have an opportunity to become our next entrepreneurs in the community and it allows us to provide an authentic space.

So we do at least five a year.

Wow.

And each one has a special focus around a holiday that celebrates that the cultural heritage of a particular group.

And we're these held in different places all over the city or a specific a specific spot that you have each year.

We kind of pick a specific area.

Right now we're doing Patten Parkway.

We will have two more animations and Patten Parkway before the before mid June.

And then we'll be working with some other partners to determine the next place making space.

And that's usually based on access and need.

And as a lot of people would love to see us move more into more of the ethnic areas of the community or into those areas, it's actually more important to bring them into our general public space because they need to engage with the general population of Chattanooga.

So they can recognize and see what a beautifully diverse and amazing community we really have.

How do you do all of this?

Do you have a plethora of volunteers or you're an army of one?

I mean.

It's a lot of community stakeholders because where there's a need, there's a group that's already putting things together.

They already know the people in the community already know what's there.

And that's why our mobile arts programing is so successful is because we can go work with the Bethlehem Center or we can go in and work in Alton Park or these different areas, or we can work with community stakeholders say, Hey, we really need to animate this space because these local businesses need that.

And I'm like, That's a great public space that we could also connect these cultures with the general population.

And so it's a lot of it has to do with our partners and our sponsors and the people who support us every which way.

You know.

What about the, the art teachers in the school system and everything?

Are they getting any training or education from you that they can use And you mentioned the VW Labs.

That's our brand new program that we've launched this this year.

And but we have done a lot of teacher training and input throughout our time, you know, since we've been starting this, because it's very important to hear how the teachers are doing, what's impacting them, what needs do they have?

They have so much responsibility and so much work on their hands that if there's a way we can supplement and help with what they're doing.

And also it helps the kids.

And at the end of the day, giving these kids those opportunities is the most important thing we can do.

And they're right there with me on it.

So it's it's like, hey, how can we how can we have an art program that gets these kids into the VW lab?

Well, let's figure out a Tennessee based standards curriculum so they can come in and learn how to use a digital laser cutter so they can make a mobile like Alexander Calder or do something like other sculptors can make.

And from there, that spark can happen.

And that's how that's to me, that's the most amazing thing you can do for a job.

Yeah, I think so too.

I think it's just because I've always heard that the the art, whether it's music or painting or whatever, that stimulates the creative side of your brain, which also helps with the science and the mathematics.

You got to have the yin and the yang going on there.

Absolutely you do.

Even if you're painting, you have to know where your dimensions are.

You need to know scale, you need to know color, you need to know how your different mediums apply.

There's a huge creative process involved, but while kids are creating, they don't realize it, but they're learning necessary skills, and because they're enjoying it, they it's more receptive to them.

And then they get the confidence, especially when we exhibit their work in public events like we make and things they get that confidence that boosts that.

Now I can take it and I can grow it from here.

I can make something from this and from myself.

Yeah, but that also to those that are like struggling with difficulties at home or in the social life or whatever like that, this is also a safe place for them too, because then they can express internally what's going on externally in their artwork with busy hands.

Yeah, you know, kind of sort of tone it down a little bit I think too.

So yeah.

It comes in a lot of ways.

I think one safe place that art can do, that a lot of other things can, is these kids don't always know how to process what they're going through and some of them are not comfortable communicating it, but they love to get their hands on something to create and make and express themselves.

And yeah, that provides a huge mental health component to what we do as well.

So are there volunteer opportunities?

Absolute.

When you see people all the time from event planning to help with events, We have ambassadors that put our artists up when we do our big event and it's great to host an artist in your home.

You get to meet somebody and learn some some other skills.

One of our ambassadors last year has taken up painting since they hosted an artist.

They had such a great time.

So we're always down to have other people or mentoring or programing or urban art bike.

We're always looking for ways volunteers can help out.

Again on our website, there's a way you can sign up for to join us and be part of our team.

Yeah, well, and I do want to direct our viewers to your website.

There's a plethora of information out there and I love it.

I think you've done a really great job with it.

So thank you so much for coming in today and thank you for joining us today.

We hope Chattanooga Stronger Together provides a new perspective for viewers like you who are looking to make a difference in our community.

So let us know what you think.

Email us at Stronger at WTCI TV dot org or use the hashtag Stronger WTC on social media.

I'm Barbara Marter.

We'll see you next time.

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Thank you.