Tacoma Refugee Choir

Website: https://www.refugeechoir.org/

Budget Size: Between 100 and 500k

Region: Southwest

County: Pierce

Population Centered: BIPOC

Mission Statement: Creating spaces for authentic expression, interconnection, and healing through song and music.

Community Accelerator Grant Award: $22,500

Primary Impact Category: Employment

When we sat down to speak with Tacoma Refugee Choir’s Executive & Artistic Director, Erin Guinup, her Zoom background was resplendent with balloons – her birthday was around the corner, she had just completed her MBA the past weekend, and, with the choir preparing to resume their weekly sessions after their summer hiatus, there was certainly plenty to celebrate.

The Tacoma Refugee Choir is a musical community that embraces refugees, immigrants, and community members who seek belonging. Founded in 2016, the choir meets every Tuesday for a fun, high-energy, and affirming gathering centered around song and music. The choir, which has featured over 700 participants from 70 nations, collaboratively writes most of their songs, drawing from their diverse perspectives, experiences, languages, and musical traditions. While there’s a great deal of joy inherent in their gatherings, Erin also believes it’s important for the group to lean into difficult conversations – as she says, “learning how to embrace difference is a really beautiful part of [our] community work.”

Erin, who founded the Tacoma Refugee Choir and steered the organization through the pandemic, describes the last several years, succinctly, as “brutal.” The Community Accelerator Grant was instrumental in making the Choir more sustainable by supporting salary costs for a new Assistant Artistic Director, hired earlier this year. While the grant award only covered part of the position’s salary, Erin credits it with giving her the courage to take the leap and make the hire, trusting that the newfound time she would be able to dedicate to fundraising efforts would make up the difference in the organization’s operating budget. In a time when the arts and culture sector is experiencing record burnout, the opportunity to dream with new artistic collaborators felt crucial to Erin’s own wellbeing, as well as the continued health and vitality of the choir. And the investment has been paying off: the new Assistant Artistic Director’s skills and experience have already elevated the Choir’s cultural responsiveness and transformed the way it does outreach, providing Erin more time for other essential work.

As the choir’s staff has grown, so have its offerings. This fall, Tacoma Refugee Choir launched Harmony After Hours, a more informal weekly community gathering opportunity centered around exploring cultural heritage by working with Tacoma area-based musicians from countries including Turkmenistan, Mongolia, and China. Choir staff have also started working with students at three local schools to write their own communal songs, which the students will then teach to the adult choir for a joint concert in May. Additionally, TRC is planning a community symposium in Spring 2024 at which it plans to share lessons learned from creating spaces for voices from around the world and spotlight its members’ development as community leaders on immigrant and refugee affairs. All in all, Erin expects the choir will triple its community impact this season – meaning, hopefully, there’ll be more occasions for celebration (and many more balloons).

If you need more than just words
If you need more than just faith
If you need proof that the future is real,
Just breathe, and see, and feel, and taste
That life all around you can grow, and give, and be
– Lyrics from “Hope,” written by the Tacoma Refugee Choir in 2023