CitySongs is a creative arts based youth and community development program involving kids in the 4th-8th grades. Through diverse music participation and strength based social work/education, we help inner-city youth identify and reach their individual potential and strengthen the community. Unlike any other youth program, CitySongs fosters healthy youth development through music and social work activities. CitySongs challenges at-risk youth to master music and performance skills, to make aesthetic contributions to their communities, to take leadership roles, and to set and achieve their goals. In turn, these children provide live performances to inspire, strengthen, and vitalize their communities. CitySongs kids enrich our community with their artistic talents, their compelling stories of overcoming adversity, and their efforts to celebrate diversity and peace.

CitySongs accepts all interested youth in 4th-8th grades. Our target neighborhoods offer few opportunities for young people's ongoing, high-quality engagement in the arts, or for families to experience affordable live performances. Although open to all, participants, CitySongs kids primarily come from (and our rehearsals are held in) neighborhoods with high rates of crime, youth poverty, unemployment, and school dropout. These youth are often denied such basic human rights as full participation in family, cultural and social life, the right to develop to one’s fullest, and protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation. In order to promote participation by all interested youth, CitySongs does not charge any fees, nor do we require auditions. In nearly 14 years of programming, we have found that every interested child was able to learn to sing well enough to make a positive contribution to the group’s overall sound.

CitySongs draws on young people's shared interest in popular music to create a space where diverse kids work together toward common goals. Youth from diverse racial, cultural, and emotional backgrounds “play on the same team,” at a level of equality and camaraderie they rarely experience elsewhere. Performing publicly, CitySongs Kids present messages of pride, respect, peace, and achievement, and they challenge audience members to join them on their journey. The lessons they learn through learning to sing well as a group are relevant to their success in their schools, their communities, and on into their adulthood. Kids at CitySongs learn and re-learn the lesson that steady effort brings improvement, peer and public recognition, self-confidence, courage and the satisfaction of personal accomplishment. That’s another important lesson: real work can be fun.

Under the direction of founder, U of MN Professor of Social Work Helen Kivnick, CitySongs has become a model for “program as healthy environment.” Housed in the School of Social Work, It offers three kinds of service at once by:
1) Providing developmental support service to vulnerable young people; and
2) Training these young people in the importance of community participation; and
3) Providing actual service to the community, today, by arranging the kids’ performances.