SYRACUSE COMMUNITY CHOIR INC

The Syracuse Community Choir has provided an opportunity to sing and hear songs which provide inspiration for changing the world since 1985! For the last (ALMOST) 40 years, we have presented two big Solstice Concerts each year and numerous other performances, with singers as young as 3 and as old as 85. Each of our Solstice concerts has a theme, which always speaks to the current moment in our social justice and political climate. The list of themes for the last 12 years speaks for itself:

Spring 2012 "Change"
Fall 2012 "Peace Becomes You"
Spring 2013 "Two Row Wampum" Honor the Treaties, Protect the Earth
Fall 2013 "Earth, Air, Fire, Water"
Spring 2014 "The Power of Song" Honoring Nelson Mandela, Pete Seeger, and the Beatles
Fall 2014 "Transformation"
Spring 2015 "Dreaming on a World"
Fall 2015 "Keep on Dreaming"
Spring 2016 "Gracias a la Vida" Thanks to Life
Fall 2016 "The Great Turning"
Spring 2017 "Would You Harbor Me?" Immigration, Migration, and Sanctuary
Fall 2017 "We All, Every One of Us"
Spring 2018 "Enwatshisi.yok" It will be a Good Friendship
Fall 2018 "Climate Justice"
Spring 2019 Ganigonhi:oh "The Good Mind"
Fall 2019 "We Are"
Spring 2020 "Summer Celebration"
Winter 2020 "An Evening of Peace, Justice, and Hope"
Year 2020 Sing-Out Groups to people's homes
Spring 2021 "Keep on Moving Forward"
Winter 2021 "Honor The Dark"
Spring 2022 "The Right to Live in Peace"
Winter 2022 "Resilience"
Spring 2023 "Seeds of Transformation"
Winter 2023 "Joy As Resistence"
Spring 2024 "Rise Up"

Over time, we have also had the pleasure and the privilege to perform with some amazing local and national artists who have used their voices to bring forward peace and justice. These performers include:

Local:
Colleen Kattau
Marcia Hagan

National:
Pete Seeger
Kim and Reggie Harris
Emma’s Revolution
Francisco Herrera
Pat Humphries

While singing and performing are important, even more important is to build an inclusive community within “the Choir” (as we affectionately call it), and in our community at large. In our choir “every voice matters”. We include singers of all skill levels, whether they can read music or not, even people who may need help keeping to the pitch. We help them along. We include singers with all kinds of abilities and disabilities, ranging from physical to visual to cognitive impairments. We help them along. We include singers who don’t have transportation. We give them rides. We include singers of different racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, always opening our concert in a variety of languages and choosing songs in other languages to build bridges for understanding. We always make sure that all of our venues are wheelchair accessible, and try really hard to meet a great variety of physical needs that can arise in any group.

Important to add is that this intense commitment to building and maintaining community sustained us during the pandemic. For four seasons we had large virtual solstice concerts, guest artists, workshops/performances, speakers, open mikes, book clubs, virtual songs, teen programs, weekly community sing-outs at shut-ins’ homes, and small group discussions that kept us connected and vital.

Over the years, we’ve also built a close connection with people from the Onondaga Nation, on whose land we reside and who teach us so much about how to take good care of each other and our earth.

Since 2005, we have presented annual Peace Awards to members of our community who have made the world a more just place through their activism. Award recipients include:
2005 - The People of the Onondaga Nation and the Partnership for Onondaga Creek
2006 - Carl Patrickson: A whistleblower about unsafe practices at the Oswego Fitzpatrick Nuclear Plant
2007 - The Red Hot Mama’s Book and Community Activism Club: Seniors from the Southwest Community Center who turned their book club into fierce activism for our community
2008 - Iraq Veterans Against the War: Veterans who bravely spoke up against the ongoing invasion of Iraq
2009 - Marjorie Wilkins: A photographer who primarily documented the Black community
2010 - Geneva Hayden: A fierce advocate for children
2011 - The Syracuse Peace Council: 75th anniversary of the oldest continuous peace organization in the US
2012 - Ann Tiffany and Ed Kinane: Longtime community activists who have shown up/organized events, demonstrations, rallies, vigils, having been both arrested and imprisoned for their beliefs
2013: Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign: Onondaga Nation and NOON (Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation) organized a dramatic two row paddle down the Hudson River to the United Nations
2014: Ginny Donohue and Sam Rowser - On Point for College: Supporting Syracuse high school students with rides, academic help, housing, and a community of caring to sustain them in college
2018: Joe Heath, Esq: Started on the Attica defense team and longtime chief counsel for the Onondaga Nation
2019: Clifford Ryan: He founded “The OGs against Violence” after his son was killed, walking the streets to stop fights, often with his own body.
2020: Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: ACLU staff, brilliant speaker, and organizer; worked with Black Lives Matter, organizing a campaign to change police culture

The Choir was founded by Karen Mihalyi, who has created and nurtured so much of who we are. For many years, Karen has provided ideas, inspiration, musical talent, organizational and institutional know-how, and MUCH time!! While much of the Choir’s work is done by volunteers, we have built up our team of paid staff more and more, as Karen is hoping to relinquish much of her portfolio to younger leaders.. Currently, we have a Managing Director, a team of Creative Directors, several staff who fulfill support tasks at the rehearsals, a bookkeeper, a grant writer… For our concerts, we also hire instrumentalists, a sound technician, and a stage manager. All of these are part time positions, consultancies, or single engagements with limited pay.

Our funding, so far, has mostly come from individual donations, ticket sales, fundraisers, and grants. We have received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Community Foundation of Syracuse, CNY Arts, and the Downtown Syracuse Foundation.

We are now finding ourselves in a moment where we are learning to live without Karen’s boundless energy and need to build more capacity, both in terms of skills and money. We are quite aware that we need much more funding than we have had in the past, in order to create a sustainable work environment for our staff.

We have begun to institute a new governing structure (“sociocracy”) which echoes the Choir’s commitment to including everyone in the process, even in governance. In this vein, the Choir’s “Development Circle” has decided to join Benevity, in hopes of reaching corporate donors who share our mission and are willing to utilize their resources to help us in building a future for this amazing organization.