We at The Lewis Prize for Music believe that young people with access to Creative Youth Development music learning, performance and creation opportunities will grow into flourishing community members. We identified the second cohort of Accelerator Awardees through a national prize process granting cycle. These organizations underscore the potential for young people to utilize Creative Youth Development as a vehicle to address inequitable systems that have unjustly marginalized their communities.

The 2021 Accelerator Awardees are:
• Celina Miranda, Hyde Square Task Force (Boston, MA)
• DeLashea Strawder, Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit (Detroit, MI)
• Matthew Kerr and Christopher Thornton, Beyond the Bars (Philadelphia, PA)
• Susan Colangelo, Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective (Saint Louis, MO)

Each of the Accelerator Awardees received $500,000 from The Lewis Prize for Music to uplift systems change efforts at their respective organizations. These organizations were selected from across the United States as standouts for their work in providing creative spaces for young people to lead in imagining, cultivating and transforming their life paths.

Following the Accelerator Award recognition, The Lewis Prize for Music invited the awardees to share the ways their organizations have emerged as vital spaces for belonging, focusing on the leadership values, practices and strategies that have led youth to thrive. In the resulting essay series, the Accelerator Awardees highlighted the importance of homecoming, reflecting on the ways their organizations have risen to the immense challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the gaps they have already worked to fill in response to systemic inequities.

The essay series is inspired by the theories of homemaking and third spaces by sociologist Avtar Brah, who pioneered the academic work of diasporic studies. The Lewis Prize for Music welcomes the reader to examine the variety of ways that Creative Youth Development organizations recreate the concept of home. By outlining their organization’s approaches to being with and for young people, particularly at the nexus of community care and artistic development, these leaders push our collective thinking forward towards imagining new realities of homecoming in these extraordinary times.

We hope these essays call for increased visibility and support for the ways Creative Youth Development programs serve as home bases for creative inquiry and positive youth development, galvanizing young people to lead us all towards more artful and just futures.

The full Wholistic Homecomings essay series is available on The Lewis Prize for Music website, or view each essay with the links below.

Coming Home by Susan Colangelo
Recreating a Sense of Home by Celina Miranda
Where the heART Lives by DeLashea Strawder
Bringing Together a Tapestry of Community by Christopher Thornton

Additionally, learn about the 2023 Accelerating Change: Creative Youth Development Across the United States video series here.