If you enjoy music, enjoy songwriting, and enjoy working with and listening to kids whose voices aren't heard nearly enough, this is the club for you! 
As a student-run group at Penn, our goal is to utilize music therapy in a group setting, particularly among marginalized youth, in order to elevate their moods, promote healthy dialogue, and help foster group communication and cohesion. We utilize a tweaked version of the intervention developed by psychologist Jonathan Blake, where he saw that when group songwriting was implemented among a 13-17 year old demographic, an increase in positivity and vulnerability was observed in how the kids felt about themselves and their peers. The idea behind this is nothing new: adolescents have utilized songwriting and music to increase the impact of their voices at afterschool and summer programs, as seen in further research:
<ins>https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&amp;context=expressive_theses</ins>
<a href="https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/JAAL.00048"><ins>https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/JAAL.00048</ins></a>
The gist of implementation is getting a group together, prompting free writing before getting to the songwriting, and choosing the tune of a voted-on popular (family-friendly) song to fit lyrics too according to a preselected theme (for example, a theme for a week may be ‘calm’, and then we’d draw from the kids’ free-writing to find words and phrases that we can insert into our new creation.

Songwriting for Smiles Alumni