A Week in the Life of HHSL

This is an example of our “Weekly Journal”, which provides an inside look at our process to create the songs and videos that our youth author. We thought that it was important to document the process behind our work, because we believe that the process is just as important as the product. We also, from a business standpoint, thought that it was important to showcase our day-to-day with hopes to attract more schools to bring us in as artists. For the Digital Is audience, we share this so that you might consider adapting a program like this at your own school. 

We touch several different schools in our work week, which are located in Brooklyn and the Bronx. On Fridays, we work solely at Cornerstone Academy for Social Action (C.A.S.A.) Middle School. C.A.S.A. is where the program first started almost a year-and-a-half ago, and it has been exciting to be able to work with young people within a school setting on a consistent basis. At the end of this video, you will see their principle Mr. Bowman speaking on the academic gains the school made the previous year. He credits our program as one of the main influences for this growth.

One of the most unique aspects of the program is that each issue we speak to the youth about references an everyday hero working to make a change as it relates to that issue. We always celebrate that hero in the song and make an effort to get the song and video to them. This has allowed for the students we work with to connect with an authentic audience comprised of both local and global figures.

In the video above, you see our C.A.S.A kids who wrote a song to celebrate the CNN Hero of the year. We were wonderfully suprised to reach her with our song. She was so grateful that she sent 20 beautiful t-shirts all the way from her hometown of Indonesia as a thank you gift to our kids. It’s moments like this that remind us how powerful song can be, and how central relationship building is in our work.