RHYTHM: Reaching Youth Through Music is the signature school engagement program of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.
These resources outline the programming and preparation for a main school event for the RHYTHM program—the in-school assembly with the students and your chorus.
This is the lesson plan used when going into schools typically 1-2 weeks before the RHYTHM assembly. The goal of this session is to teach the students about the power of making music through the lens of activism to create social change.
This workshop’s goal is to learn more about the experiences of the queer students on campus so that they can be uplifted during the whole-school assembly.
This survey is ideally completed by all of the students who will be attending the assembly in a few weeks.
All of these resources are used for the in-school assembly, both internally with singers as well as externally for the schools.
This document is shared with the singing membership and contains pretty much everything that they will need to know about the day of the assembly to set them up for success. It also includes reminders of protocols and expectations on how to engage with the students while on campus.
The front office at the schools often ask for a list of everyone coming onto campus, so having this list is helpful to hand them so singers can easily check themselves off when they arrive and it speeds up the check-in process. Schools also then have a record of who is on campus in case an emergency arises.
This is the guidebook of the flow for each assembly. Each script will look a little different depending on the various elements included for each school.
One of the most powerful things we can do in the assembly is have our singers introduce themselves to show the diversity within our chorus – more specifically the diversity that you don’t just see physically. When the singers register for the season we collect some information about themselves to help us select as diverse a group as possible. During introductions the singers say their first name, pronouns, how long they’ve sung with our chorus, where they are originally from, and what they do for a living.
All of the resources below are used to measure the impact of the program, collect stories from the experience to share with our community, and to hear about suggestions on ways that the impact can be increased through modifications to the program.
