I've spent my life walking into rooms
where something true was waiting
to be heard.
The circle where music became something else
I was a classically trained opera singer living in Berlin, a decade into a career I had pursued with everything I had. I'd earned my master's at the Universität der Künste, performed in German opera houses, sung alongside artists I'd admired my whole life. And I was beginning to understand that the structures I'd dedicated myself to — the hierarchy, the distance between performer and audience, the sense that what mattered was the art and not the people in the room — were slowly taking something from me.
Then a friend invited me to a gathering called EveryoneSong. Every Thursday, in the flame-colored art studio of a candle artist named Maha Alusi — herself a refugee from Iraq — a circle of people sat together: longtime Berliners, newly arrived Syrians and Iraqis, people who shared almost no language and almost no context. Someone would share a song that mattered to them. The story behind it. The memory it held. And despite the translation, despite the gaps, something moved across the room. People danced. Laughed. Recognized each other.
I watched people who had been forced to flee everything find something in that room that stabilized them. They told me later that EveryoneSong — being held by a group of people, half of whom understood what they'd been through and half of whom didn't but cared deeply — gave them the strength to find their place in a strange new world.
That was the first time I understood that the act of being heard — truly, generously heard — is not a soft thing. It is structural. It holds people up. And music and story, together, were the method.
The mothers who knew the way out
My husband and I moved to California in 2017. I was trying to build a solo singing career in the US. And what I kept seeing — in LA, then in Oakland and the East Bay — was something that Germany's social democracy had shielded me from for a decade: the particular American violence of extreme poverty alongside extreme wealth, playing out in the most expensive real estate in the world.
The opening lines of Schubert's Winterreise started circling in my head. Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh ich wieder aus — as a stranger I came, and as a stranger I will leave. A song cycle about being cast out, homeless and heartbroken in winter. I'd been studying this music my whole adult life. And suddenly I understood what I might actually have to say with it.
I reached out to women in Oakland who were living through housing instability — mothers raising children in shelters, in cars, in the spaces that society pretended not to see. I didn't go in with a narrative. I went in with a recorder and a set of questions and the genuine desire to understand. I sat with them. I listened for hours. I asked what it was like to be a mother when the world kept telling your children they didn't matter.
What I found was that they didn't just have stories. They had analysis. They knew exactly why the systems were failing. They knew what the way out looked like. They were the most politically and structurally clear people I'd ever spoken with — and the world was largely not listening to them.
The people at the center of the largest problems our society faces usually carry the map out. They just need someone who knows how to listen for it — and what to do with what they find.
The story that changed the law
In January 2021, a woman named Christine reached out. Her friend Jocelyn — a family engagement specialist at Berkeley Unified who had spent ten years in housing instability while raising five daughters, who had helped countless families access food and stability, who had finally found housing and begun building a life — had received a trustee notice. Her home was being foreclosed. She had fifteen days to decide if she would try to buy it.
Jocelyn had never told anyone at work about her housing situation. She was embarrassed. She was ashamed. But she had watched me do the interviews for The Winter's Journey Project, and she said no one had ever listened and actually heard her the way I did. She trusted me with her story.
I sat with her in the home she was trying to save. I recorded. I listened for the truth underneath — not just the facts of her case, but what her life actually meant, what her community meant to her, what was at stake if she lost this. In twenty-four hours I turned that conversation into a three-minute video. We organized for two weeks. We raised $200,000. Housing advocates across California used Jocelyn's story to push the State Legislature to fund SB1079 — a law providing bridge financing for tenants of foreclosed homes.
Half a billion dollars over five years. One heard person. One story told right.
Being truly heard — not just listened to, but understood at the level where the story reveals its own logic — changes what's possible. For a person. For an organization. For a community. For a law.
The town that taught me what community actually is
My family moved to Atlanta a week after an EF-4 tornado tore through Newnan, Georgia — my hometown. I waited until the news cameras left. Then I went in to find the people whose stories hadn't been told yet.
What I found was not a disaster story. It was a story about community infrastructure — the years of investment in relationship and collaboration that meant when the tornado hit at 11:45 pm, the response was already organized by morning. The national recovery organizations arrived days later to find a community that had already been coordinating for 72 hours. They came back years afterward to ask Newnan how they did it, hoping to replicate it elsewhere.
Seasons of Strength began as a series of conversations with survivors, first responders, volunteers, and leaders. It grew into an oral history project — 100+ recorded voices — and then into a nonprofit, and then into a large-scale multimedia performance: community stories woven into a live performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, held in Newnan's rebuilt high school auditorium, five years after the storm.
What the project taught me is something I now bring to every engagement: I wasn't making a piece of art about community. I was making a community organization that would help me make the piece of art about community. The things we create teach us their lessons. You cannot tell a story about belonging without first learning what it costs to build it.
The work is never just the deliverable. The work is what happens in the room — between the listener and the person being heard — and the deliverable is evidence that it happened.