There are those moments of our lives—and I hope you’ve had many—when you sit back with a sense of wonder and say to yourself, “This is a dream come true!”
Jon and I had one of those moments a few weeks ago. The moment came when our newest choir had its first rehearsal.
Many of you are aware that we have two programs in our organization. Sounds Good is our largest program, with eight choirs and 600 singers, serving cognitively healthy older adults. This robust program features non-auditioned choirs for older adults, led by professional conductors. Sounds Good is based on the model that we first encountered when we visited our friends at Encore Creativity, which came out of the groundbreaking “Creativity and Aging” study done by the NEA and NIH in the early 2000s. Good Memories is our program for people with concerns about their brain health; the singers there include people who are just curious (or even worried), as well as individuals with an actual diagnosis of dementia or mild cognitive impairment, along with people who care for them in some way and our singing volunteers. Good Memories is based on the Giving Voice model in Minneapolis. As of this fall, we have three Good Memories choirs, with more than 100 people in the program.
Ever since our organization launched the Good Memories program in 2018, Jon and I—individually and together, along with others—have been nursing the dream of a Good Memories choir in a predominantly African-American neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. (We’ll tell you more below about why this is so important.) The on-the-ground realization of the dream has been full of surprises, full of new learnings, and most of all, of learning to listen deeply and let go of assumptions about “what we thought we knew.”
But let’s suspend time for a moment and look at the day that the dream really came true.
September 26 found us at the Kroc Center in West Pullman, in a room with more than 40 new friends, learning “He Has Done Marvelous Things,” a gospel song that, while new for us, was a familiar favorite for almost everyone else in the room. Stephen Kelly, our gifted conductor, taught us all just by ear. And learning music by call-and-response, without printed sheet music, was also new for me. (Jon was lucky to have learned gospel music that way in the Chicago Children’s Choir.) Along with a few volunteers from the Sounds Good choirs and a mother-and-son singer pair from the far South Side, we were the few white faces in a room full of people of color. That’s what we were aiming for.
How This Began
The nuts-and-bolts realization of this dream began almost two years ago, in February 2025, during a lunch conversation with some generous donors with whom Jon and I have had a many-years relationship. Jon and I had just returned from a vacation in Kauai and were looking ahead to the coming year. Our donors surprised us with the question, “What are you guys dreaming of next?” We had no problem answering that, since we’d actually been giving it some prolonged thought. We tend to do that on vacation, in addition to reading lots of books!
We told them, “We have a vision to expand the Good Memories program, to bring music and joy to more people with dementia and their care partners.” In addition to adding more Good Memories choirs, Jon had given some thought to a change of his own role in our organization, with the idea that he could focus on the dementia choirs and bring on a colleague to be the leader of the Sounds Good choirs.
Our donors wanted to know more, so we told them that our dream was to have 10 Good Memories choirs in five years, including choirs in South Side neighborhoods. And to our amazement, our donors are happy, along with many of you, to be part of helping that dream come true.
One Way to Start a New Good Memories Choir
Walking on the beach in Kauai, we had imagined two main kinds of Good Memories choirs. One was a type that we’d created twice before the pandemic. This type comes about when we put a Good Memories choir in a location where we already have a Sounds Good (cognitively healthy) choir. We did this on the Gold Coast in 2018, with the Good Memories choir that survived Covid, and it has kept going for eight years. Many of the volunteers came from our “Monday choir,” the Gold Coast Sounds Good choir that just celebrated its 10th anniversary. We did this also in Evanston in 2019, with a Good Memories Choir that drew on the Evanston Sounds Good choir for most of its volunteers. That lovely choir unfortunately got only one semester under its belt, with Hannah Dixon McConnell as its enthusiastic and sensitive conductor, before Covid shut it down. All of the people with dementia in the Evanston Good Memories choir either moved into a care facility, moved out of town, or passed away. The only family in the choir living with dementia was a couple from Highland Park who joined online during Covid. The rest of the choir during the pandemic was a large group of devoted volunteers along with staff and through their vigorous efforts morphed post-pandemic into the Dementia-friendly Evanston Sounds Good choir.)
But Why Do This Other Thing?
You may have heard the statistic that we heard early on in our work with people with memory loss: the incidence of dementia in Black and Latino communities is between 1.5 and 3 times that of the white population. Hearing that statistic made us feel sad, angry, and motivated, among other things. Since we heard that news, we resolved to bring our Good Memories program to the South Side. We wanted to make this combination of joy, music-making and community available to a part of our metropolis where residents typically struggle not only with more dementia but also with fewer resources than are available in most of the other areas in which we have choirs.
We have been incredibly fortunate over the past decade to build a thriving arts community. But with that success comes a new responsibility. As we got closer to completing our first decade of work here, we didn’t want to just look back at ten years and celebrate what we’ve built. We also wanted to look forward and see where our programs are needed most. The South Side deserves the same kind of high-quality arts experiences, resources, joyful spaces, and safe places to nurture brain health through music that we’ve been privileged to provide elsewhere.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that in 2026?
* * * * * * *
By the summer of 2025, Jon and I had brought this dream to our board, along with the news that we would have significant backing to bring the project to life. We then sat down with two very important people in the organization to do some essential brainstorming: Lynn Clark and Regan Burke. Lynn and Regan joined our board at the same time, in May of 2022. Lynn has been the chair of our Good Memories program committee since its inception, a committee on which Regan also serves. They are both founding singers in Good Memories, having been with us since that first Fall 2018 session. Lynn actually has been with us longer than that, since she first joined the Hinsdale Sounds Good choir in Fall of 2017.
Let me tell you a little more about them. Regan Burke is a published author, blogger, volunteer—longtime board member of Skyline Village, among other things—with decades of experience in local and national government. She ran Bill Clinton’s advance team and worked in both Clinton administrations; she was a leader in the Cook County Clerk’s office; and she is a longtime board member of RAINN. Dr. Lynn Clark is a retired professor of Sign Language and Interpreter Training at Waubonsee Community College and has extensive nonprofit board experience; she is also a lifelong choral singer and is active in several ensembles around the area in addition to ours. She is a deep listener and problem-solver. She also has been the chair of our board of directors since November 2025, helping us in countless ways, including being a leader at the board level to help get this Good Memories expansion off the ground.
* * * * * * *
Now let me return to those conversations in the summer of 2025. There was one over Zoom and then a lunch downtown (at Doc B’s, as I recall). We were trying to figure out who we needed to talk to and what to say. At the downtown lunch, Regan and Lynn were firm and fierce with me and Jon that if we were going to try to put a choir on the South Side we had better, as Regan put it, “learn to shut up, ask smart people in the community for advice, stop pretending you know anything about how to do this, listen to what people tell you, and take their advice.” How many founders of nonprofits get that sort of blunt and helpful feedback?
We told them that we weren’t sure who to talk to first. Regan told us about a woman whose work she respected deeply, a speech pathologist named Dr. Treasyri Williams-Wood (pronounced “Treasure”). She is an opera singer who got a doctorate in speech pathology at Northwestern, has a practice in Bronzeville, and has a consulting practice. Part of her practice is to work with arts groups whose experience is mostly outside the Black community, to help them follow a community-organizing model so that the project has deep cultural sensitivity and therefore would have a higher chance of success than doing it with less of that sort of background and trust-building.
Right around this same time, I learned about another arts group that had a program for people with dementia which had been successful on the North Side. This other nonprofit then tried, unsuccessfully, to replicate its program on the South Side. Their executive director generously offered to meet with me and share their experience in hopes that we could benefit from their experience. I’m grateful for her humility and generosity, because from that conversation, I learned that having good intentions wasn’t going to be enough. We were going to need help to do this—just as Regan had said.
What happened next was amazing. Over the course of about six weeks we must have heard Treasyri’s name from about ten different people, among them Phyllis Timpo from UChicago, Janie Urbanic from South Loop Village, Phyllis Mitzen from Skyline Village, and a bunch of the other professional rock stars in our local world of aging and dementia. Jon and I have adopted the saying, “All roads led us to Treasyri.” It was reassuring that this happened, since it gave us so much confidence that we’d found a helpful guide who could walk us through this process.
* * * * * * *
In the fall of 2025, we invited Treasyri to attend a Gold Coast Good Memories rehearsal and then to join me, Jon, and Lynn for lunch afterward. Thus began an adventure like no other we’ve had before; a 12-month period of learning about community-organizing methods, of working closely with people with deep roots on the South Side, and of taking on a task that we had been warned might not succeed, because this turns out not to be easy.
Lynn became board chair in November 2025, at our final board meeting of the year. At that same meeting, our board adopted our 2026 budget, which included not only adding two new Good Memories Choirs (South Side and Hinsdale) but also bringing Treasyri on as a consultant, so that the South Side project would have a greater probability of success.
The seeds for our dream were planted and the adventure was just beginning!
In their next blog post, Sandy and Jon share how Dr. Treasyri Williams-Wood assembles a community advisory board to help develop the new South Side Good Memories choir with input directly from the community.
Sandy, what a FABULOUS post! It was like having a conversation with you about an amazing adventure, and I felt like I was in the room (or on the beach, or at Doc B’s, or the rehearsal) with you all as you figured out how to make a dream turn into a success. So fun to see and especially listen to the video. Thank you for sharing this with all of us out here in Sounds Good Land.