In early 2020, two friends, with together more than a decade of experience creating communities through music in Colorado Springs, noticed that almost all the choirs they saw, were segregated, seemingly by choice. Victoria Lipscomb and Kim Schultz asked each other two questions: Why talk about the power of music to bring people together if you’re not going to? How about we do it ourselves, and bring in all the people we know would want to get in on this?
The vision for Unity Project was simple at the start, create an inclusive choir group that is diverse racially, generationally, occupationally, that engages in community outreach for the sake of it, sharing the possibility of connection through song with each other and the Springs, while supporting choir members as people, first and foremost. Kim and Victoria shared their ideas with a group of 50 in a video call during the fall of 2020, and despite most of the people involved showing great interest, there was an almost violently swift realization, as Victoria put it, that what would need to happen for that dream to even be possible would be so much more complicated.
Victoria and Kim both remember it as a time they, and everyone else who wanted to be a part of Unity Project, had to face vulnerabilities they weren’t ready to face. In the Unity Project’s first meeting, some white women began weeping about racial injustices, which left the non-white members so uncomfortable at having to manage this reaction to something that most directly affected them, that one of them felt she had to leave the project. Before she left though, she shared the reasons why she was leaving with Kim and Victoria, and then with the other members in a letter when Kim and Victoria asked her to, and in doing so changed Unity Project fundamentally. It showed them that if they wanted to use music as a way to transcend the differences between people, they would have to do the painstaking work of transcending those differences themselves first.
Unity Project didn’t perform for four years, and instead spent that time learning how to move away from crying and towards doing, how to heal from the wounds of white supremacy, how to create a space where you don’t have to be afraid of messing up “because you’re probably gonna grow a whole lot more,” as Kim puts it. That process was deeply difficult, and Unity Project lost more members, but the solidarity and trust that those who stayed gained let them create the space they wanted to, where they can ask for what they need without guilt and give what they can without judgment. That’s why, when Unity Project was finally ready to start reaching out to other organizations, they didn’t offer just their voices, they asked “what do you need?” Sometimes that is song, but it’s always flexible, because making sure everyone has what they need is what equity means to Unity Project.