Swan Strings is a Dallas-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to providing free and accessible music education, community concerts, and sound therapy services to individuals and communities throughout North Texas who may otherwise face barriers to arts education.
Founded in 2017, Swan Strings began with a simple goal: to make quality music instruction accessible regardless of income, background, age, or experience. Today, the organization serves approximately 100 students each month and reaches more than 1,200 individuals annually through free music lessons, workshops, community programming, performance opportunities, concerts, youth programs, community partnerships, and wellness-centered musical experiences.
Our programs bring music directly into neighborhoods and community spaces across Dallas. Through partnerships with cultural centers, libraries, recreation centers, schools, senior centers, healthcare facilities, and community organizations, Swan Strings provides instruction in guitar and other stringed instruments while creating pathways for participants of all ages to develop musicianship, confidence, creativity, and community.
Our work with seniors is an important part of our commitment to making music accessible across generations. Through music instruction, songwriting, group music-making, and wellness-centered experiences at senior centers, participants have opportunities to remain creatively engaged, build community, learn new skills, and share their own stories through music.
Swan Strings is especially committed to expanding opportunities for young people and communities historically underrepresented within music education and the music industry. Our programming includes Girls Rock Dallas, an annual youth music program where students receive instrument instruction, form bands, write original songs, participate in workshops, and perform for their families and community.
Our work also connects music education with history, storytelling, sustainability, and cultural preservation. Through Behind the Strings, Swan Strings creates educational and artistic experiences that center the contributions and stories of Black women and gender-expansive musicians in guitar culture. The initiative has expanded beyond film into workshops, performances, conversations, and educational programming designed to inspire the next generation of musicians.
Through our Unstrung Gourd Project, we are exploring the relationship between land, music, history, and instrument-making. In partnership with community organizations and artists, Swan Strings grows bottle gourds that can be harvested, dried, and transformed into handmade banjos. Participants learn about the African and African American roots of the banjo while gaining hands-on experience with gardening, instrument construction, songwriting, and music-making.
Swan Strings also recognizes music as a resource for wellness. Through our sound therapy services, we bring musicians into healthcare and community wellness environments, including Parkland Hospital’s Burn Unit and Cancer Center, as well as senior centers and other community-based spaces. These experiences use live music and sound to create restorative and supportive environments for patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, seniors, and community members. By bringing music into spaces where people are navigating treatment, recovery, aging, and other life experiences, Swan Strings extends the impact of our mission beyond traditional music education.
At the heart of Swan Strings is the belief that access to music can transform individuals and strengthen communities at every stage of life. A first guitar lesson can become a lifelong creative practice. A young musician can discover their voice onstage. A senior can turn a lifetime of memories into a song. A garden can become an instrument. A community concert can create connections across generations. Music in a healthcare environment can offer a moment of comfort and restoration.
Support through North Texas Giving Day helps Swan Strings keep these experiences accessible by providing instruments and supplies, compensating teaching and performing artists, supporting free community classes, expanding youth and senior programming, maintaining our gourd-growing and instrument-making initiatives, and bringing music and wellness programming into more North Texas communities.
When you give to Swan Strings, you are helping us put instruments into hands, artists into communities, young people onto stages, seniors into creative spaces, and music within reach for everyone.
Swan Strings provides free music education and sound therapy services across North Texans to individuals without access to such services, due to economic, physical, mental or other hardships.
Racial Equity Policy
Access to music education is impacted by racial and ethnic inequities. This policy exists to support Swan Strings in eradicating the fallacy of racial human hierarchy to ensure communities have the resources to change the narrative of who creates, engages in, and performs music.
Swan Strings’s Mission and reason for committing to racial equity:
Swan Strings provides free music education, community concerts and sound therapy services to North Texas individuals without access. Racial equity is an important value at the foundation of the organization to address barriers created from structural and systematic racism.
(*Terms: Race is a social and political construct that falsely separates and groups people. Racial and ethnic identity are complex. Black and Brown refers to individuals and communities of the African diaspora and Latin America and is inclusive of all communities who identify as Black and Brown.)
Impact of racism:
Access to music education is not equitable. Physical participation is often a focus of programming. However, Black and Brown* students in Dallas are disproportionately impacted by lack of representation in instructors, culturally responsive curriculum and repertoire, and access to particular instruments that support musicianship and cultural representation.
Exploitation happens when students are presented as primary beneficiaries of programs and resources but do not continue to receive equitable access and support that allows for careers in performance or education within the respective institution. Programs to address lack of representation exist, but it sometimes lead to exploitation of students, instructors, and community artists as a result of racial inequity - engagement with Black and Brown* students is not an initiative of Swan Strings, but rather a primary focus at the foundation of Swan Strings.
Racial inequities impact psychological safety and support for students, preventing their participation in shaping their desired outcome in response to their lived experiences. Racial stereotypes present incomplete narratives about music education and performance, resulting in people not seeing themselves in music or only seeing limited representation in music. Individuals seeking music education are also impacted by lack of physical safety in practice and performance processes, including expectations for practice hours and technique.
Swan Strings’s commitment to racial equity and commitment in action:
Swan Strings concentrates on Black and Brown students and communities because there has been a lack of access to structured music education due to systemic and systematic racism.
Swan Strings’s will:
Dedicate resources to research and document engagement in free music education to support a more complete narrative
Create intentional partnerships with organizations to gain access to Black and Brown students
Commit to the representation of BIPOC instructors and musicians through engagement, media, and press
Prioritize the health of staff, board, students, and constituents through programming and experiences that support sound and music as healing
Provide safe environments for students to learn, practice, and perform music that is meaningful to them.
Providing equitable resources for students to continue engaging in music education, such as culturally responsive curriculum and access to instruments
Policy research and sources:
Daphne A. Brooks: Liner Notes For The Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Nikole Hannah Jones: 1619 Project
Lynne Denise: Why Willie Mae Matters
Organization name
Swan Strings
Tax id (EIN)
83-4017184
Causes
Arts & Humanities
Operating Budget
$100,000 - $249,999
Counties Served
Dallas
BIPOC Serving
Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx
BIPOC Leadership
Executive Director/CEO
Address
4140 Commerce