At a music therapy session run by the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, Aiden Diaz, left, passed the drum to his brother JoAngel. Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
In Sunday’s (4/28) New York Times, Andy Newman writes, “Therapists from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music have found that teaching homeless children to make beats and write songs is a way to heal trauma. ‘We’re going to be making a beat,’ Dannyele Crawford said as the kids settled noisily into their seats at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn…. Six-year-old Bella Diaz and the other five children in a room lined with computers donned headphones and began choosing from hundreds of audio loops in the music software program GarageBand…. Crawford, 27, is a music therapist, there to help children deal with the stress of not having a permanent place to call home. Since 2015, therapists who work for the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music have made regular visits to the 158-family shelter in the Brownsville neighborhood, run by the nonprofit Camba. Across the country, children and teenagers face a mental health crisis that has grown since the pandemic … At the same time, the number of children in homeless shelters in New York has risen sharply … Joslyn Carter, administrator of the City Department of Homeless Services, said that the conservatory’s music therapy program ‘really does help children just be children.’ ”
