towards This week on the A-list, I sit down with a musician and philanthropist who is using her unique gifts to empowe young people around the country.

what we try to do wit be the change in the nonprofit now is just creating even more opportunities for people to see they have worth by bringing their one thing to the table.

That's like the one thin that we like to talk about a lot is what's everyone's one thin that they can bring to the table in order to better our community.

And how can you use that to not just uplift yourself, but also be able to extend a helping hand to other people around you?

Join m as I sit down with founder of Be the Change Youth Initiative, Sydney Guerrette.

Coming up next on the A-list.

In 2017 Sydney Guerrette founded Be the Change Youth Initiative a nonprofit that, with the help of children and teens acros the country, has now raised over $100,000 for organizations like Make-A-Wish America.

At the time of its inception, Sydney had just celebrated her 15th birthday.

Her early passion for giving back served as the inspiration to encourage other young people to utilize their own gifts and talents to be the chang they wanted to see in the world.

Now, her career as a musician has become an integral part of her work with youth I had the chance to sit down with Sydney at Redbud venue here in Chattanooga, where she has found a home to record her music and operate her nonprofit, all in one welcoming space.

[Acoustic Music] Well, Sidney, welcome to the A-list.

Thanks for having me.

Super excited to be here.

Well, thanks for having me, because this is a cool space.

It's a really cool space.

You hang out here a lot.

I do, I do.

I love Redbud with all my heart.

[laughs] But before we get to how we got here, I want to talk about where you came from.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Portland, Maine.

Okay.

Grew up there pretty much my entire life, until I was 18 and then lived in an RV for 11 months with my entire family.

And then because of Covid, I got stranded in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

And that's the shortest story.

And that's the shortest version of the story.

Yes.

I want to go back to Main and the impetus for your family literally picking up and moving into an RV and living life on the road until you made it to Chattanooga.

Tell me firs what happened when you were 14 and you were trying to figure out your birthday?

Yeah.

So growing up my parents had always encouraged my siblings and I to give back.

I'm the oldest of four, and for birthday parties, instead of having typical birthday parties where people would bring gifts for you and you'd have lik a celebration just for yourself.

That was still a part of it.

But instead of the whole gif component, we would ask people to bring donations for either a nonprofit or I had my like, first birthda or my sixth birthday party at an Animal shelter, things like that.

Just to give back to the community.

Talk about the importanc of thinking outside of yourself.

And for my 15th birthday, I wanted to do something super big.

I didn't know what that would look like.

So I was 14.

It was the summer before my birthday.

My birthday's in September.

I told my parents this and they used to be wish grant for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

And that to me was kind of an immediate oh yeah, this makes sense.

I'm going to be giving back to youth.

let's go ahead and do it.

So I look how much it would cost to grant a wish in Maine, the chapter in Maine that I was in, and it was $7,000.

So I'd already told peopl I was going to raise this money.

I already committed to it.

And then I didn't have a job at the time.

So I started freaking out and I pulled my aside and I was like, what do I do?

How am I going to do this?

And she's like, okay, calm down.

We can figure out a way to go about this, how you just get your friends involved.

And that was the turning poin for how things started for us.

So I got a group of there's like 12 of us that did this together.

Some of them were really talented runners, love doing cross-country track, and so they wanted to run five KS over the course of the summer.

Wrote fundraising letters.

One of my other friends designed a t shirt and sold those.

My friend and I, we ended up writing a song, sold it in, on bass or Bandcamp and recorded in his basement, did all of that.

Got a couple hundred buck from that, some to bake sales.

But we were all just this group of u encouraging each other to say, what are things we all love to do?

How can we use those to uplift our community and think outside of ourselves?

And during that same time, there were actually a handful of us that were part of the same youth group and the youth leader, when he found out that I was organizing this with my friends, he actually discouraged a bunch of my friends from getting involved, told me things that I wasn't good enough, that I was too young to make a difference.

And at that point, I was like, who says this to anyone in the first place?

But especially as someone wh is under you in leadership, I.

Feel like that person is actually paid and mandated to uplift you, not to, right.

-Right, exactly.

So it just did not connect.

But that happened.

You see this adult who said all these things and it didn't make sense at the time.

But then also on the other side, I was seeing how all my friends were encouraging each other and saying that we all have something to contribut to make the world a little bit better than we found it and how can we continue to push that forward?

So that's where the original idea for Be the Change Youth Initiative came to be.

And it wasn't a nonprofit at first.

I actually licensed it to be a nonprofit when we first moved to Chattanooga back in 2021, I think summer 2021.

And before that, it was just a thing that my family did.

So we took that model of fundraising with a group of friends, and we put together a six page fundraising packet.

My mom at the time was working with the Fairtrade Company, and so she had a bunch of family, other connections, other employees throughout the U.S. and so we got connected through Facebook with their kids.

And between ages five and 17, we encourage a bunch of kids all over the US using the fundraising packet to fundraise over $50,000 for different organizations that we're doing work all over the world.

It's really cool.

We had some in Haiti and Rwanda, had some connections in the Bahamas, some connections in the U.S. we still continue doing Make-A-Wish, but that was kind of all of sudden how everything started to kind of become what it is today.

It's changed over the last several years, for sure, but at the heart, it's still really focused on how do we engage with youth.

How do we create opportunities for them to see that they have unique gifts and talents that they can use to make a difference, see if they have worth, and that worth can be used to uplift other people, not just themselves, but other people around them.

And that's, you know, the most important thing, especially in the culture that we live in.

And you raised the 7000.

Yes, we did finish raising the 7000, which is great.

It took us six months, but still worth it.

Yeah, it was worth it.

Despite that discouragin experience with her former youth leader, Sydney proved early on that she was capable of achieving remarkable things and uplifting others along the way.

Formative to her success was undoubtedly the backing of a community rooted in support from her tight knit family.

Well you glossed over it before, but let's talk about living in an RV for a year?

Yes [laughs] Not a full year, but eleven months.

How did that happen?

So my brother Brayden started struggling with mental health and the community tha we were living in for a while.

A lot of people didn't know how to had the mental health conversation.

Also, there weren't a lot of mental health resources.

There was a long wait fo counseling, like 3 to 6 months wait for counseling.

And because he was struggling, my parents were kind of desperate.

They're like, we don't really have the resources.

You don't have the help around us.

And this was well before Covid.

Yeah, this was before Covid.

Yeah.

And so, you know, after then having the conversation and us still doing this not at the time, but the nonprofit work, the fundraising packets, seeing all of that happen with what we were doing across the country through zoom calls, fundraising, all that stuff.

But my parents made the decision to basically my dad quit his job.

They sold the house, gave away 60% of what they owned, and decided to buy an RV without even looking at it, and moved all of us into the RV, and we decided to take the message of Be the change on the road.

And I was doing music solo at the time and doing my own solo projects.

I was going back and fort between Franklin, Tennessee and Portland, Maine to intern at a studio to work with the producer down there.

And then we lived in the R and the whole thing was that was we during like one of the first shows that we had, because that was lik my way of getting back was I'm creating space for other kid to use their gifts to fundraise, but also what are my gifts that I can use to give back.

And that's where the music comes in.

The music has always been my healing source in a way that I can really get all my thoughts across without, you know getting lost in the translation.

I gues it's my way of just being able to process everything before I say it.

Storytellin or just talking with somebody.

And I wanted to do shows as part of the presentation for when we would talk about the fundraising packets or talk in front of students, or do you have shows and things like that?

So that was a part of the experience.

We traveled to 42 states and we did those shows, fundraising for the Make-A-Wish Foundation in Texas and just getting as many students that want to engage with the fundraising packet.

But the whole point of that is we had our very first show, and I was doing my own solo stuff, doing like a couple of songs of my own, some songs I had written, storytelling about my own experiences with mental health.

Struggling with anxiet and body dysmorphia, depression.

And then my brother for the very first time was like, I think I want to share my story.

And up to that point, he was a musician as well.

We're both musicians.

My parents forced us to, play piano for three years when we were like four, and if we didn't want to continue it, that was fine.

But we had to play piano for three years.

Thankfully we continued that, but he was always a musician.

I never really knew that he liked singing, and I didn't know tha he liked writing his own music.

And so during that first sho in May 2019, we were in Texas.

That was our first stop, while living in the RV, he decided to share a story for the first time.

And sing a Song, he wrote about his own experiences of struggling with mental health, and that kind of was the first moment that things really changed for us, not just with the work that we were doing, but also with our direction as musicians as well.

We at the end of the show, there was a middle school student that came up to me and she basically was just like, hey, I just want you to know that because Brayden shared his story, I was reminded that I'm not alone.

In what I'm going through.

And we went back to the RV, our whole family, and we stayed up to 1 a.m. talking with our parents afterwards because we realized we're like, okay, well, we've just been focusing on the youth empowerment aspect of what we do, the fundraising aspect, but this has been brought to our attention.

Mental health is a reall important thing to talk about.

How do we make sure that we take care of this responsibly?

How do we go about this conversation?

I know this feels like something that we need to talk about.

Sharing our own stories can create an impact.

So what does that look like?

So that's kind of when we decided to just stay on the road for 11 months.

It was only supposed to be like a 3 to 4 month thing, just to make sure that my parents were there for Brayden when he was struggling.

But because the door opened and the conversation opened, we ended up just staying on the road, traveling to 42 states we partnered with to write Love in Our Arms, which is a national mental health organization.

They're amazing.

We got the training from them in Canada, and then we got to bring their resources with us when we were traveling, doing shows, and then everything happened with Covid and we couldnt travel safely anymore.

And Chattanooga wat the last stop.

so I sort of picture your family like the philanthropic Partridge Family.

You may be too young to remember the Partridge Family.

I do know what youre talking about though?

Yeah, but the intersection of all of these things seems beautiful and magical and rare and authentic and vulnerable.

And all of these things.

What has made it for you, this journey, so important and why?

Music.

I know that the musical aspect is not incidental to the be the change.

It's not incidenta to the mental health component.

How has music been the, I guess, conduit for all of these messages that you and Braden and your famil are trying to convey to others?

Music transcends barriers.

And I thin in the time that we live in now, there's a lot of hostility in conversation.

How do people talk abou the taboo topics going around?

And I think one thing that really ties people together, regardless of our differences regardless of our backgrounds, it's music.

I think music is something that pulls people together.

There's a massive community around it, not just with the musicians, but the audience, the people that are listening to it.

I know that I one of the first questions that I ask someone whenever I get to know them is like, who are some of the people that you love listening to?

Just because it's a way to get to know them?

A little bit better?

Because, you know, some like so much from someone based on an artist that they listen to or a song they really like, gets them inspired.

And I think especially for my brother and I, in the midst of our hurt, in the midst of our own struggles with mental health, when we felt like we didn't have the words in order to reach out to someone else.

It was a way for us to heal, and it was a way for us to cope with what we were struggling with at the time.

And mental health is an ongoing thing, right?

I mean, mental health is something that you're probably going to be struggling with for the rest of your life.

Like sometimes things do go away, but sometimes you do struggle with depression and anxiety and body dysmorphia for the rest of your life.

And there are ways to go about seeking help, whether it's a therapist or counselor seeking guidance, or a friend or a guardian.

Someone like that there are resources available.

But also it's like, what are the things that you can go to and gravitate towards that bring you life and bring you joy and pull you out of what are some of the hardest experiences for you to go through?

And I think what we try to do with be the change in the nonprofit now is just creating even more opportunities for people to see their work by bringing their one thing to the table.

That's like the one thin that we like to talk about a lot is what's everyone's one thin that they can bring to the table in order to better our community.

And how can you use that to not just uplift yourself, but also be able to extend a helping hand to other people around you?

It's clear that music has been healing for Sydney and her brother Brayden, as they've navigated thei individual struggles and found community and connection through their storytelling.

Now, the singer songwriter duo have come together to form their indie group In the Company of Wolves and the two have found a musical home right here at Redbud.

I go.

Oh.

I mean, do you remember when you and Braden first sang together?

Oh, because I've heard you sing together and.

It is I mean, they say that family members.

Right?

There's something about your tones.

You two are.

I mean, it feels exquisite when you listen to the two of you.

Together, and it's hard to.

Imagine that never happening, right?

Like if you that had.

Never even through serendipity or whatever you want to call.

It.

But you're coming togethe through music, not just family.

When was that when you first sang together?

I think the first time that we performed together, we did a show right before living in the RV.

So it's kind of like a sendoff with our friends and family that were in Maine.

We performed together for the first time, and that was kind of when we were like, oh, wait, there's something to this, maybe we should do it.

And then we had that show in May in 2019, and that's when he shared a son by himself for the first time.

And then the conversation kind of just led on, and we were like, we should do this together.

And we started writin our own songs together in the RV a lot about our own mental health experiences, but it really came dow to just spending all that time because we had so much tim when we were living in the RV, and a lot of inspiration from meeting new people to going to new places, trying new things, being creative like all of it, was really kind of the beginning and push that we needed to kind of say, like, there's something to what we're going to do and I wouldn't change it.

I love working with him.

He's like the best.

So.

And you both write the music?

Yep.

We do.

We both write a play on it.

Is that hard to figure out whose song you use or whose lyrics?

-Honestly, No.

I think we've also learned to really communicate well with one another.

I think it's always hard when you're working with a sibling because you you guys know like what ticks each other off.

And so we were like, we're always teasing.

And there's always points of that because we're siblings, obviously.

But at the same time, I think we also know each other really well.

He's like one of my best friends is something that even though we're like three years apart, two and a half years apart, I'm both that way with all my siblings and so getting to do it with him, he's also just very genuine and humble and generous and just really kind.

So it's easy to work with him.

Yeah.

I don't know how your parents don't.

Listen to y'all talk.

About each other or sing with each other and not cry every day.

You know, I can.

I can see that, too.

They make comments about tha all the time, especially my mom.

Tears of joy I know what yeah, exactly.

four.

Sydney music and philanthropy have always been inherently linked.

shes found a way to marry her two passions in one space.

There we go.

You.

Well, this is convenient.

Just around the corner.

I know, it's so nice here.

So we've only been here I think, for a year and a half.

We ended up we have one of our, toy initiatives.

So we work with CGLA and the Highland Park Montessori School and for the last couple of years, we've been getting them presents to all of their students.

And so there was a time when we realized we're going to need a bigger space to store everything that we have, because we were doing so much.

And so we starte renting this place from Brent.

And it's nice because we do so much from playing the venue downstairs to rehearsing downstairs to doing studio work.

It's no having an office with some here.

But yeah, some of this stuff is my favorite.

These are lik all of our old nonprofit shirts when I first started out.

So many.

And then these, these art, pieces are all from students that we've worked with at Red Bank High School.

So we had an art auction.

We've had art auctions with them.

This will be our third year in a row.

And so these are all pieces that we, auctioned on pretty much so because we're like, we want t keep some for our office space.

But yeah, they're all amazing.

Some of them are my absolute favorites.

But this one we're using for a Be the Change collective vinyl, so Be the Change Collective is the music arm of the nonprofit.

It's basically just giving opportunities to local musicians who want to engage in the community and do a lot of volunteering or advocacy work, and we wanted to put togethe a mental health awareness vinyl.

And so that was actually going to be the cover of it, which you're super stoked about it.

But yeah, they're so talented.

I just love looking at all this stuff because it reminds us of why we do what we do.

So throughout this journey, what have you figured out that you're really good at?

That's a good question.

I know it's a long list, but what's at the top?

I'm good at creating space for people, and I' good at advocating for people.

I am grateful that I have the platform that I do.

As long as I continue to have a platform, I'm going to continue using it to spotlight and highlight what other people are doing.

Just because to me, that's the most important thing that you can do as a leader.

So I liste and I advocate for people well.

And who do you go to in order to make sur that someone's listening to you.

And my mom.

Yeah, I go to my mom a lot.

She is one of the most generous people you'll ever meet in your entire life.

Very kind and also outspoken in an amazing advocat for the people in our community.

I learned so much from her as far as what it takes to be a good leader, what makes a good leader.

But then also I go to her for advice and comfort because she knows me best and I seek a lot of wisdom.

Also just kindness from her.

She just exudes it.

So I would not be where I am without my parents for sure.

With the support of her family, Sydney has already accomplished so much in her young life.

And she has worked to counteract the negative feedback she received early on by making sure to uplift other young people who are seeking ways to make a difference.

There we When you look back at your 14 year old self, are there things you assumed or thought about the work that you're doing now that have totally aligned with the way you lead?

Or are there ways tha you've said, oh my gosh, I was that how silly or how naive?

And I know we all grow and evolve, so but anything that you really think like significantly has changed since then.

Oh goodness that's a really good question.

I honestly don't think about it as often as I think I should.

I think a lot of it too is because when I was 14, 15, I.

And to be fair, I still struggle with a lot of limiting self beliefs.

I think because there have been a lot of people in my life who I did look up to that have made comments, not just the youth leader, but other people in the music industry.

When I was doing a lot of my own solo stuff, a lot of people have made comment that I'm not going to have songs that are good enough to be on the radio, or I'm not going to be good enough artist X, Y, and Z.

Right.

And I think when you full-heartedly believe that you're meant to do something and you have people in your life who tell you that you can't do that thing and that you don't hav what it takes to do that thing, it can be one of the hardest things to like, keep moving forward, right?

It can be really difficult to keep your eyes set on that feeling, that gut feeling that you have that no, I'm meant to do this thing while I'm here on Earth.

Like that's what I meant to do.

So I think looking back on my 14 year old self, I am thankful for the resilience.

And I'm thankful for the fact that she didn't give up.

And I've learned so much and I've grown so much over the years.

I think the importance of also recognizing what it takes to be a good leader, being humble, making sure you're inviting people to the table.

I have a conversation with m mom a lot about the definition of what a good leader does, and she has this amazin example of a good a good leader, someone who creates opportunity for other and then wants them to succeed farther than they've ever succeeded.

And and to me, that has always been my goal is creating a space for other people to come to the table.

It could be youth, it could be another adult.

And just seeing and encouraging them, like, you guys have something special that you can use to better the world.

And I'm not sayin that as like an overstatement.

It's true.

Like, we all have something that we can use to contribute to making the world a little bit brighter.

And I think if I can just continue to push that message forward, and carry that that's the most important thing.

So I'm thankful that my younger self was like, keep going.

And if there's, you know, a parent, a grandparent, a neighbor watching this right now and wants to know what's the most important conversation they can have with a young person in their life.

What do you think that is?

That's a really good question.

I honestly think the more that I hang out with youth and the more that I spend time with them, they just want to be seen and they want to be understood and heard.

And I think the one thing that we can have to do, we have to do this as adults, is just create that space for them to just be really who they are, to listen to their stories, to engage in conversations, to love them, to create spaces for them to just be as unique as they possibly can and, wit no judgment and no condemnation.

And I think if we can continue to do that and create those spaces, it's not just about conversations, right?

I think it starts with conversations with them, but it's all about the actions that we take with the people around us first, the conversations, having those conversations, and then how do we take it out of that and actually engage with people and create the spaces and, do more than just talk?

Yeah.

Well, thanks for being the change.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

Watch even more of the shows you love any time with wtci passport.

An exclusive benefit for members of wtci pbs.

Watch your favorite shows and passport on the free PBS app.

Download it today.