| Name | Reed |
|---|---|
| Last Name | Caldwell |
| Home Address | 4220 Seneca Avenue Chattanooga, TN 37409 United States |
| Organization Name | Songbirds Foundation |
| Describe Your Role In The Organization | Executive Director |
| Organization Address | 35 Station Street Chattanooga, TN 37408 United States |
| Website | https://www.songbirdsfoundation.org |
| Best Phone Number To Reach You | 828-361-9125 |
| Alternate Phone Number | |
| Email Address | info@songbirdsfoundation.org |
| Alternate Email Address | reed@songbirdsfoundation.org |
| Please Describe Your Project In Detail | Part 1: The New Songbirds Attraction After a tumultuous year dealing with the pandemic, the Songbirds Guitar Museum closed its doors permanently in August 2020. After a large outpouring of sadness and support from our friends across Chattanooga and beyond, the Songbirds Foundation decided to pick up the pieces and reimagine the Museum to reflect our educational mission and preserve this Southside anchor institution. After a hard year of fundraising, researching, designing and building, the Songbirds Foundation launched an all-new interactive museum, Songbirds Guitar & Pop Culture Museum. This educational museum offers guitar-centric, hands-on STEAM based activities; celebrity guitar exhibits that include amazing guitars like those owned by Merle Travis, Chuck Berry, Duane Allman, and Loretta Lynn; a Chattanooga music history zone; cultural exhibits showcasing the significance of the guitar throughout the decades; a spotlight on the career of the Impressions and their music’s contribution to the Civil Rights movement; and a custom built stage for hosting concerts, workshops, master classes, and events. Since the launch of the new Songbirds, we’ve had to cancel or postpone numerous concerts and workshops due to COVID-19. Ticket numbers have been lower than we anticipated due to the ongoing pandemic and the public’s general apprehension to be indoors. Weekly attendance numbers in the museum are not as high as we had estimated. With a loss of revenue from events, we need to find more funding sources to help cover our operational expenses to stay open. The Museum also is the primary fundraising machine for our Guitars for Kids Program. As revenue decreases so does our ability to provide free guitars, therapy, and lessons. Part 2: Guitars for Kids Our Guitars for Kids program ensures thousands of students across Chattanooga and the surrounding states have access to instruments, a robust musical education, and in-depth music therapy. We primarily support children ages 9-17 of all races, creeds, and backgrounds, who would otherwise be without or who have limited access to a musical education and/or to musical instruments. We also partner with area nonprofits and partner organizations to provide cognitive music therapy to children who are differently abled. COVID-19 has forced us to cancel our fundraising events and modify our program to fit the changing landscape. Fortunately, we have been utilizing a virtual learning portal to teach kids in other parts of the state for the past several years and were able to shift all of our classes online. Virtual lessons helped students cope with the isolation caused by the pandemic while providing them with guitar fundamentals that cover a diverse range of playing styles and techniques. Our program also utilizes certified music therapists to work with children who are critically ill or injured or have special needs. Students work with these therapists to develop their social-emotional capacity and learn to work through social, health, and life issues. Therapists incorporate evidence-based music activities to accomplish individualized goals, study the effect of music on kids, and promote measurable changes in behavior or function. Students work in groups, create friendships, and establish musical bonds with other players. This type of group interaction is essential for kids who have experienced bullying or have atypical developments such as autism, Down syndrome, or Asperger’s. Even through these extremely difficult times, we have been able to deliver over 800 free guitars to area schools and nonprofits and provide over 100,000 hours of free guitar lessons and music therapy in 2021 alone. |
| Please explain how your project meets the requirements of the American Rescue Plan | These funds will address negative economic impacts caused by the public health emergency to our non-profit. We feel strongly that this recovery money is essential to preserving anchor institutions who have struggled during the pandemic– struggled and continued to provide robust services even in the daunting face of adversity and hardship. As we look towards the future, and we ponder what Chattanooga will look like when the pandemic eases, we must first look at the institutions, like Songbirds, that helped pull us through this troubled time and have worked diligently to ensure that music can thrive when normalcy returns. Songbirds was hit hard by the pandemic. The Songbirds Guitar Museum (which was a for-profit institution) closed its doors for good in August 2020 due to the pandemic. The investors in that venture and the Songbirds Foundation decided to join forces to ensure that the Southside anchor institution could live on. During the following year, the Foundation worked to raise money to redesign and rebuild the space to reflect our mission of education. The Foundation put in countless hours researching, writing, building, and designing a new hands-on experience that could be enjoyed by all ages for decades to come. Around the same time, the Hamilton County School District contacted the Foundation with a problem—the school system was going to be forced to cancel all chorus classes for 1200 students due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They asked the Foundation if we could possibly provide enough guitars to replace all chorus classes across the city with our Guitars for Kids Program. The Foundation decided that it was of the utmost importance to preserve music education for these students—so we committed an additional 400 guitars (which doubled the amount we had budgeted for 2020). We used a portion of our operating budget to fund this project. We also offered intensive training to all Hamilton County chorus teachers, regardless of their guitar background, and provided them with a donated set of 25-50 guitars, curriculum books, equipment (picks, strings, bags, tuners), and ongoing support. The guitars and equipment will stay at the schools after the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided and will be integrated into chorus classes creating hybrid singer-songwriter classes. After an arduous year, the Museum reopened in September 2021 as a non-profit. Since then, Songbirds has not met its projected revenue targets as customers have stayed home during the pandemic causing concerts to underperform and fundraisers and events to be canceled, and admissions to dwindle, but the biggest loss is decreased funding for our Guitars for Kids Program. The Museum is now the primary cash generator for our Guitars for Kids program. As our overall Museum income decreases, funding for our Guitars for Kids program decreases as well. Where our Guitars for Kids program was a “success” in 2021– providing 3,500 kids over 100,000 hours of free guitar lessons and therapy to kids across the south– we had to turn away just as many students and schools due to budget concerns and cuts. This decrease in income also caused a myriad of other problems such as difficulty covering operating (rent, insurance, etc.) and payroll expenses. We’ve had to be very conservative with staffing and many of our employees have had to shoulder a larger work-load due to the pandemic. The Chattanooga American Rescue Plan funds will help us fill in the budgetary hole created by the pandemic, allowing us to get back on track financially, keep our doors open, continue to be a beacon of musical education, and enrich the lives of students and visitors across Chattanooga and the surrounding region. For the past six years, Songbirds has stood as a beacon of musical wonder– sharing intimate stories, preserving our robust musical history, and promoting Chattanooga’s unique brand. These recovery funds are essential to our continued success and to the success of our educational programing. We hope that you will consider this project a priority and help us build a better and more musical future for Chattanooga. |
| Where would your project take place? | Songbirds, 35 Station Street, Chattanooga, TN 37408 + Hamilton County Schools |
| How much will your project cost in total? | 100000 |
| Do you have any matching funding sources from other local governments, private entities, non-profits, or philanthropic entities for your project? | Yes |
| Please describe the source and list amounts of any other funding. | Yes, Songbirds will provide a 1:1 match for these funds. We already have $25,000 committed from Lauren Daigle’s Price Fund. |
| What portion of the project are you asking the city to fund? | Our annual budget is $822,500. We are requesting $100,000 to support our efforts. |
| If funded, when would your project start? | March 1, 2022 |
| How long would your project take to complete? | One year |
| What milestones would you use to measure your project’s progress? | For our Guitars for Kids program, we will measure success in the following ways: 1. Help Hamilton County Schools preserve music education for more than 3000 students by ensuring that our program continues and thrives. 2. Increase the amount of time students are exposed to music at participant schools. On average, students receive as little as 15 minutes of music education per week. Our GFK program increases this to 2-3 hours of hands-on instruction per week. 3. Allow SF to pay our instructors and music therapists an industry standard wage. 4. Improve a student's musical abilities. 70% of program participants will pass a beginner guitar proficiency test. These tests will be administered at the end of the Spring semester. We collect data on the number of schools, non-profits, teachers, and students that participate in our programming. We also track the number of guitars in the field, hours of musical instruction offered, and the amount of music therapy hours provided. These numbers help us assess our current footprint and overall impact, which influence our goal-setting targets for annual planning. We currently work with 45 teachers; 1800 students (4000 by 2022); 45 schools; and 14 partner organizations (30 by 2022). We also focus on data that is more qualitative. We receive feedback on our students’ progress from teachers, heads of school, and parent testimonials. We watch our students’ confidence progress first-hand and give them the opportunity to play alongside national performers. For the Songbirds Pop Culture and Guitar Museum, we will measure our success through: 1. Attendance tracking through our ticketing software, See Tickets, a ticket selling company with a myriad of ways to track ticket purchases and user data. We host 100-125 concerts a year, attracting 30,000-40,000 visitors. Furthermore, the new space will be open to all 44,500 Hamilton County students. It is our hope that we will see a return to pre-Covid numbers. 2. Event tracking. We anticipate hosting over 80 events outside of concerts. These events will include master guitar classes, featuring world class guitarists, as well as educational classes for children based on the TN State Educational Standards. All ticketing will be conducted through See Tickets (as mentioned above). 3. Revenue return: We anticipate that Songbirds will generate over $800,000 in revenue during the 2022 fiscal year if the pandemic is mild or controlled. This will allow us to function at full capacity, adding 5 jobs and dramatically expanding our Guitars for Kids program to serve over 5000 students. All revenue generated from the new attraction will help support our Guitars for Kids program. |
| How would you ensure accountability and transparency throughout the project lifecycle? | Songbirds is an audited public 501(c)3 non-profit organization and all financial records are closely monitored and available to the public. This grant will help fund our organization– helping with rent, insurance, payroll, talent buying, and above all, our Guitars for Kids program. We are happy to share out 2022 budget with you. |
| If successful, how would your project benefit the community? | This attraction will allow Songbirds to continue to be a Southside beacon and help Station Street continue to be a major economic driver in the downtown area, bringing locals and visitors to the space for year-round exhibits, concerts, and special events, while improving the economy for local residents. The Songbirds brand has a track record of attracting thousands of people to see exhibits and performances. Between its exhibits and concerts, Songbirds will continue to export Chattanooga’s music brand regionally and nationally. Songbirds also benefits the community by: 1. Helping combat the decrease in music education in area schools. We have seen a dramatic decline in state funding for the arts across the board. Our Guitars for Kids program helps fill in that funding gap and ensure that all students have a chance for a hands-on musical education. 2. Stimulating the music economy and artist development: Songbirds 260-seat venue provides a necessary stepping stone for bands on the rise. There are very few venues in Chattanooga, and small venues help create and sustain a vibrant music scene. Songbirds provides a crucial mid-size concert space that gives local and regional bands the opportunity to grow and develop in Chattanooga. 3. Providing an unrivaled musical experience: Songbirds Pop Culture & Guitar Museum provides a unique blend of public events, concerts, educational seminars, Chattanooga Music history, and guitar based exhibits to the public. This ensures that kids and adults from all backgrounds have a unique place to enjoy and participate in the joy of music. 4. Stimulating Creativity: Statistics show that a robust music education helps students increase test scores, build self-confidence, develop language and reasoning skills, stay engaged, improve behavior, and get accepted to college. Program participants will also be at the heart of our target cities’ future music economy and will become the next generation of creators, makers, promoters, designers, concertgoers, and musicians. |
| How will you attract community buy-in for your project? | Songbirds is already deeply embedded in the local community– providing guitars and lessons in every public middle and high school in the county and being a Southside anchor organization. Songbirds is striving to help Chattanooga become a more musical town by sharing its rich history and providing the backbone of the current music economy. That said, we are also working with other organizations such as the Creative Discovery Museum, Bessie Smith Cultural Center, RISE, ArtsBuild, The Tivoli Theatre, Chattanooga Tourism Company, and other Chattanooga institutions to ensure we are complementing their efforts and working to further Chattanooga as a musical tourist destination. We also have an in-depth marketing plan geared towards attracting both tourists and locals to Songbirds for events, concerts, museum visits, and music tours. This plan includes destination branding and marketing through owned, earned, and paid media. |
| Is there anything else you would like us to know about your project? |