“Discovering children’s resilience and their passion to give back to the community is something that inspired me on my path today,” says Tamara Menon (BMus ’20), founder of the YUVA Arts Project. 

In 2011, Menon began working with Songbound, an initiative that sets up and sustains choirs for marginalized children in India. For more than five years, she facilitated song-writing sessions with children of commercially sexually exploited women, and other groups of marginalized youth.

 “Through my work with these young people, I realized that I needed more understanding of the role that music was playing in our lives,” says Menon.

To gain that understanding, Menon came to Laurier’s Community Music program. “Through the program I met some incredible musicians and activists, both within Laurier and also outside Laurier,” she says. “I definitely want to express my gratitude to the entire Faculty of Music at Laurier, our mentor Dr Gerard Yun and the three women at Laurier who continue to inspire me, Mary Joy Philip, Professor Deanna Yerichuk and Isabel Cisterna Pino.” Menon also experienced deeply connecting musical experiences with her peers.

“In the first year of the Community Music program, I was new here, and I was very nervous about what my experience was going to be like,” she says. “But there used to be a piano right outside the music building, and we would just gather there. No matter how cold it was, we’d gather there and we would make music together. Sometimes it was pleasant to listen to and sometimes it wasn’t, but it was so much fun.”

The Community Music program also connected Menon to the world of community arts-based programs for youth in Canada.

Together with YUVA team members Olivia Maveal, Lisette Pineau, Sara Pickard and Giorgia Benazzi, Menon started the YUVA Arts Project, an organization dedicated to bringing together marginalized youth from various cultures to create change through the arts. The YUVA Arts Project organized the first exchange between newcomer and Indigenous youth in Canada and marginalized youth in India. 

“Having worked with youth here and finding some parallels between newcomer youth and Indigenous youth in the area, such as displacement and integration,” she says, “I decided that there could be an exchange that happens between these three youth populations, and they could use arts-based methods to actually tell their stories and also dream about their future selves.” (is she referencing India in this paragraph? I am not sure).

While travel restrictions due to COVID-19 have limited the YUVA Arts Project’s offerings temporarily, Menon and her team are making the most of this time. “Personally, as an immigrant, the pandemic has affected my ability to visit my family and also to meet the youth back home,” she says. She thought she would be travelling more this fall and meeting with youth, but the pandemic had others plans. 

“This time has also helped us in many ways, in that we’ve used this time to reflect, assess, and evaluate what happened last year with the project, to think about who we are as a team and how we would like to move forward.”

As a 2020 graduate, Menon advises current and future Community Music students not to shy away from being uncomfortable. “Try to find ways to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable, because that’s when you actually start learning and start growing,” she says. 

“And take advantage of the faculty members,” Menon adds. “The professors are so approachable and invested in what their students want to do.”