Parkland Students Songwriting Project

In early June 2019 Operation Respect and the Parkland students were invited to officially join partners in the Peace Boat at the UN in New York City, with performances and participation in The Future of Healing in Schools at NYU.  Subsequently, our friends and partners at IANSA informed us of the Solve opportunity, particularly with the interest of organizations addressing gun-violence with creative and innovative solutions.  On the eve of the launch of the Parkland Students Songwriting Project, this is auspicious, as the timing could not be better to roll-out the initiative on a national and global scale.

The Challenge of Our Times -  There is an increasing call to address the intersection between social and emotional learning, academic achievement and long-term mental health for successful outcomes in educational settings.  Anxiety, fear and alienation are rising on campuses, public spaces and communities, locally, nationally and globally.  Mental health professionals cite alienation as the number-one social and emotional challenge of our times.  Gender-based violence and teen suicide are on the rise, particularly among trans-sexual youth and females.  Pervasive bullying, disrespect and lack of compassion threaten the future across state and national boundaries, jeopardizing civility, tolerance, acceptance, public safety and the common good.  In what is now called the "Lock Down Generation," over one-quarter million students since Columbine have been in schools where there has been a massacre.  Widespread cases of PTSD are now diagnosed in middle, high schools and colleges.  Music venues in cities across the nation and world have recently been targeted in proportions of violence unseen before, from Orlando to Las Vegas, Paris to Thousand Oaks.

The organization's classroom-based Don't Laugh at Me anti-bullying curriculum is in thousands of schools in the US and around the world.  Featuring inspiring music, social-emotional learning and highly regarded professional training and tools to help children express feelings constructively, resolve conflict peacefully, celebrate diversity fully and engage in environments caringly, over 500,000 educators, administrators, parents, community leaders and policymakers have attended Operation Respect presentations.  In partnership with Kids Write Songs, over 1,200 schools nationwide have been led in workshops to create music speaking to issues of concern affecting entire school communities:  bullying, disrespect, peer pressure, self-esteem, diversity, on-campus violence and mass shootings.  Our work stretches from far-rural, impoverished populations to urban centers, with the greater New York/tri-state region the foundation and hub of the mission.  Evolving from this core is the Parkland Students Songwriting Project, an inspirational and practical application in solidarity with students and communities across the nation to bring transformational change via digital media - a strategic digital campaign to integrate awareness, preventative measures and municipal/school district news and information related to the signs of interpersonal violence and tangible steps to necessarily take to mitigate catastrophic outcomes.

 The Parkland Students Songwriting Project is an issue-driven communications platform taking on one of the most challenging social problems we face today:  mass violence in our communities.  Utilizing experts in civic engagement, media and digital strategy, the approach is designed to drive social and behavioral issues forward.  Capacities and tactics to be employed include strategic positioning and messaging, comprehensive campaign management, content development, graphic design and branding as well as special events.  On the community-partnership level, the campaign involves coalition building, influencer engagement, capacity building, earned and digital media and advertising. The digital approach of the campaign is shaped by strategic focus, creative spirit and data rigor.  Digital advertising assets include targeting methods, IP Cluster Targeting, social media custom audiences, matching first party data of Operation Respect and third party and consumer data, as well as search behavior.  This is not a moment, but a movement.  Music has long powered movements, and the release of the Parkland album is no different, integrated into the social-awareness and violence prevention campaign to advance the moral and just intention of the students.  The focus remains on the students, though in the strategy are powerful artists and influencers to activate support of the mission.  Cause partnerships will be essential in the roll-out, including Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud, Snapchat and Instagram.  The viral engagement elements allow community members to engage with the compelling content and city-informed content, including a custom app allowing people, after moderation, to insert their own video recording into a music video from their respective city.  In "free licensing" the songs a call is put out to student videographers to make the music videos central in the movement's perpetual content creation.

When approached to offer up professional songwriters experts to compose melody an lyrics for the Parkland community, our first impulse was the truest:  No.  The students themselves would express in their emotion, thoughts, ideas, dreams and inspirations, what must be put down in tune and in word.  This is the essence of the Parkland Students Songwriting Project and what makes the process, from composition to distribution, compelling and sincere.  The songs are designed to come straight from the heart of the youth to their peers, and other communities across the country and world, as to what it means to be impacted and traumatized on this level, and their voice is the catalyst to inspire others to do the same.  It is peer-to-peer creativity and solution-based.

The project is organic in its origins, and technologically savvy in its execution.  Starting with students on the floor in a room, with guitars and keyboards, sheets of blank paper and their ideas, the songs are composed.  The recording utilizes state-of-the-art professional studio expertise and equipment, mixing boards and editing tools, to complete the tracks.  Distribution platforms utilize all conventional digital platforms, with a website in development.  Also in development are video productions to complement the compositions and VR experiences to link student songwriters around the nation and world to the experience.

Conventional changemakers are in regular practice with mixed results, advocating for time-proven data and evidence-based solutions, all noteworthy and highly important.  However, now and then, the solutions needed for proper human interaction, inspiration and connection require a return to the basic elements associated with our behavior.  Music has been called the common language of the human race, a medium as old as our earliest recorded communication.  In the Parkland Students Songwriting Project, we have adopted this communal expression to serve as a tool for expression and healing in the most recognizable format.  The main difference is the students are not steered in any preconceived communication.  They are writing the tunes and lyrics straight from their experiences, feelings and calls for change.  This has not been employed on a national level with a slate of songs, national tour, social-impact campaign and replicable model, ever.  The transformation is coming, and as one of their songs declares:  The Children Will Lead the Way.

In twenty years employing peace-building, conflict-resolution tools with trainings for faculty, teachers and administrators across the county, the Operation Respect Don't Laugh at Me anti-bullying curriculum has been adopted by over 20,000 school programs nationally and across the world (translated into multiple languages).  The reach is in the hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of communities.  The Parkland Students Songwriting Project will be rolled out to this existing base as well as new partnership circles involving organizations such as the National Superintendents Roundtable and the National Association for Music Educators.  It is anticipated in the next 18 months our reach with the music, in digital formats, will touch 20 percent of the U.S. population alone, and be adopted by another 10 nations in our partnership with the United Nations International Peace Day Youth Summit, in alliance with mission offices representing several host countries.

Beginning in the fall of 2019 through 2020 the social-impact campaign of the project will incorporate:

Integrated communications capabilities with experts in digital, creative, media and political communications working to conceive and execute the rollout of the project.

Detailed media plans to execute cost-effected ad buys, taking a data-driven approach to determine the best vehicles to grow and activate bases.

Testing of user experiences and monitoring advertising campaign analytics to successfully optimize ad performance and ensuring desired action and outcomes.

Using the best third-party data in conjunction with sophisticated targeting methods to identify and reach key audiences, with optimal goal in five years seeing a dramatic return to civility on campuses and in communities, a reversal of the incidence of mass violence/shootings in the nation and commitment to sane gun policy setting a foundation of safety for generations to come.

It is essential the campaign unify partners across society in order to effective coalesce narrative, messaging and intention.  The project provides an obvious and time-proven solidifier:  music and youth.  There are multiple, noble organizations taking the stage to improve conditions, but the effective campaign will serve as glue in the alliance of partners.  

Funding will be essential.  Pilot /seed support, such as SOLVE, will serve as catalyst for the targeted philanthropists who have identified gun violence as a priority, including such corporations as Levi's, Toms Shoes, Dick's Sporting Goods, Delta and Bloomberg.  We must overcome barriers to competitive funding and unite with large entities such as Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and others to make the campaign as viable as it deserves.  

Lastly, we must overcome entrenched narratives and well-funded sources aimed at discrediting young voices.  A campaign that is positive and solution-focused will counter the negative and cynical.

The project shall remain genuine, sincere and transparent, originate and steered by young voices with intelligent, positive and emotive voices undeterred by the pessimistic voices of past generations, and driven by memory of the those they have lost.

It is a human-spirit project, at the core a project founded by our most inspirational calling:  the right to live in peace.

The youth maintain the songs in the project speak for themselves, and can overcome any manipulated strategy to discredit or silence their voices.

The project consists of 24 people, a cross section of production, creative directors, volunteer song-writing consultants, the core Parkland student leadership and parental chaperones.  Six professional lead the social-impact campaign team.

Going back to our team steering and executing the Concert for Newtown, aired on PBS, the organization is uniquely positioned in the music, content distribution and public/advocacy space on this issue - no other organization has the cross-section of expertise, experience and contacts.  Additionally, twenty years of providing innovative violence-prevention curricula into school programming positions us uniquely, and effectively, to reach the nation's (and other conflict areas around the world) with immediate inroads into the academic environment.

We are partnering in the Parkland community with Shine and Change the Ref, and on the national stage with Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action.  On the song recording/distribution front our partner is Kobalt, and on the social-impact campaign stage we have the incomparable RALLY.

The business model, executed with RALLY, calls for a proposed four-month original roll-engagement (planning) in fall 2019.

Digital strategy and execution commences late fall into early winter 2020, in conjunction with Operation Respect 20th Anniversary actions and goals.  

Media production, graphic design, and web development are incorporated to advance the project for a minimum of three-to-five years

In parallel with Operation Respect's 20th Anniversary, we have established the 20/20 Task Force Committee, a body of a dozen professionals committed to soliciting and securing sustainability resources for the project and the mission over the duration of this period - an established goal of 4 million to be raised toward a corpus/endowment over the next 18 months.

There will be a series of special appeals, quarterly special events across the country and a robust partnership outreach plan in action - The GREATER Circle - official alliance in the Operation Respect mission.

There is a glaring, dangerous and disturbing trend in schools and communities across society, where broken dialogue, damaged relations and bullying, when manifested in the most profane fashion, stigmatized and popularized often in the digital cycles, results in mass violence and traumatized populations.  A mass shooting is defined as having two or more fatalities.  Just since Columbine, over 250,000 young students have been in a school where a mass shooting has taken place.  Far beyond the deceased are countless others suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, with suicide on a alarming incline among young people, most particularly girls.  

The new generation of voices no longer seeks just empathy - the demand action and solution.  Solve speaks to this.  In the Parkland Students Songwriting Project one discovers innovative, creative and determined young lives seeking long-term change and solution through a time-honored and proven medium, music.  These students, and the MIT Solve community, share the values and DNA focused on the word and its most clear intention:  solve.

We are keenly motivated to bridge efforts with nationally recognized advocates and movements aimed at solution:  Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action.  Additionally, alliance with international bodies sharing the vision on a global scale for sane policy and solution include the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), in partnership with the United Nations Youth Summit.  

In sync with the music industry we will seek partnership with The Recording Academy and its chapter leadership across the nation, and build ties with our contacts at NEXUS, a social network of young innovators, tech entrepreneurs and solution-based philanthropists.

The Parkland Students Songwriting Project is a perfect ally and complementary tool for the Everytown for Gun Safety movement.  With Everytown's national profile, strategically positioned across the country with machinery, contacts and well-established advocacy professionals, our project provides an aspirational and moving force within an existing strategy for change.  Instead of developing or replicating a movement, we wish to attach and apply the elements of this project to the existing, reputable and momentum-building motor that is Everytown.  It is a perfect alliance of voices and intention.  As Congressman John Lewis reminds:  The Civil Rights Movement without music would have been a dove without wings.  The movement calls for the spirit and channel of the music - and we are properly positioned to partner with Everytown in this most critical endeavor.