our work
Street Symphony is a community of professional musicians who bring world-class performances and meaningful musical engagement to people living in homelessness, incarceration, and recovery across Los Angeles County.
Founded in 2011 by violinist Vijay Gupta, Street Symphony builds sustained relationships through music, creating spaces of connection, dignity, and hope. We believe that artistry and empathy are inseparable—that the same discipline and excellence required on the concert stage can foster healing, belonging, and human regard when shared directly with those most isolated from cultural life.
The organization’s beginnings were humble. After meeting Nathaniel Ayers, a Juilliard-trained musician living with schizophrenia whose life inspired The Soloist, Gupta began calling shelters, clinics, and service centers across Los Angeles to ask if he and a few colleagues could come and play. The first visits were small and informal: a violin, a viola, a few musicians gathered in a crowded room. People drifted in and out; some listened, others sang back. Those early encounters revealed the essential truth of the work—that music could be a conversation, not a performance.
Our mission
To create opportunities for deep musical encounter in places where live performance rarely happens.
In 2011, Street Symphony formalized as a nonprofit dedicated to using music as a bridge between worlds that rarely meet. Since then, our artists have presented more than 3,000 performances and workshops in shelters, jails, transitional housing sites, and community centers. Each program reflects our founding belief: that consistent presence, deep listening, and artistic integrity can restore trust and remind people of their inherent worth.
our Values
Street Symphony’s programs are rooted in long-term partnership rather than one-time outreach.
Our musicians return to the same sites month after month, building genuine relationships with participants and staff. We work collaboratively with service organizations to design musical experiences that respond to each community’s needs. Performances are conversational and participatory, encouraging audiences to share songs, reflections, and memories.
The result is not entertainment offered from a distance, but connection created in real time. Our guiding values are clear and consistent.
Connection
Music as a meeting ground where human beings recognize one another.
Dignity
Every person deserves access to beauty and the chance to be heard.
Excellence
Artistic mastery offered with generosity and discipline.
Presence
Returning, listening, and earning trust through continuity.
Hope
Confidence in the power of creativity to renew the human spirit.
Through this approach, Street Symphony has helped redefine how professional artists engage with their communities. We demonstrate that excellence and accessibility are not opposites but allies—that the mastery cultivated in the concert hall can flourish in clinics, chapels, and recreation rooms. The impact is twofold: participants gain affirmation and self-expression; musicians rediscover purpose and authenticity in their craft.
Street Symphony’s work has drawn attention from cultural institutions nationwide as a model for relationship-based music engagement. Our programs show that when artists bring their full skill and humanity into spaces of marginalization, everyone is transformed. Funders and partners recognize Street Symphony for its consistency, its sustained presence in Los Angeles County’s most underserved neighborhoods, and its unwavering commitment to quality.
At its core, Street Symphony exists to remind people that they are not forgotten. Each concert, workshop, and rehearsal is an invitation to belong—to be part of a shared sound that affirms life. We measure success not in applause but in presence: a quiet room stilled by listening, a voice raised in harmony, a returning audience who now calls the music “ours.”
As the organization grows, our mission remains the same: to create connection through music that is honest, disciplined, and alive. Street Symphony stands as a living testament to what can happen when artists choose to meet the world with both mastery and compassion. In every performance, we renew the conviction that music is not a luxury—it is a human necessity.
Street Symphony believes that one note, offered with care, can change a room. Thousands of such moments, sustained over time, can change a city.
Programs
Street Symphony musicians are trained to uphold the highest artistic standards while practicing humility, adaptability, and care.
We listen beyond the notes we play: to the room, to the audience, to the stories that emerge between phrases. In turn, participants encounter music as an experience of dignity and recognition. Together, we create experiences of connection, dignity, and hope.
Music with a Mission
Music With A Mission is a free concert series held at the Midnight Mission, featuring world class ensembles performing directly for residents and the surrounding community. The program is open to the public and creates a space where people experiencing homelessness can connect with others through live music in a safe, supportive environment.
Volunteers are welcome to join and help sustain this ongoing work.
Messiah Project
Our flagship initiative, the Messiah Project, gathers hundreds of musicians and residents from the Skid Row community each December to perform Handel’s Messiah together in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Professional soloists, community choirs, and participants from shelters and recovery programs perform their own musical compositions created through Street Symphony workshops.
Downtown Women’s Center
For many women experiencing homelessness and seeking community, Skid Row can be a particularly hostile environment, and Downtown Women’s Center is the only provider organization focused on serving women in Skid Row. Every other Wednesday, Street Symphony musicians and Downtown Women’s Center residents share meditative musical offerings to convene vulnerable spaces of community and conversation.
Music for Change
A particpatory, weekly process group convened with staff members at Skid Row reentry centers, including individuals paroled from life sentences in California Prisons. pictured: Street Symphony’s jazz band featuring saxophonist David Sills.
RE/Sound Festival
The RE/Sound Festival is an annual one-day event produced by Street Symphony in partnership with The Midnight Mission. It combines live music, resource services, community vendors, and volunteer-driven outreach in one of the city’s most marginalized neighborhoods.
Midnight Strings
Midnight Strings is Street Symphony’s dedicated 12-week guitar workshop and performance residency at The Midnight Mission (TMM) in downtown Los Angeles. The program brings world-class musicianship and consistent creative mentorship to people experiencing homelessness, addiction recovery, and reentry.
Conducted inside TMM’s Education and Music Room, Midnight Strings invites participants to learn, rehearse, and perform guitar music as a shared practice of focus, collaboration, and joy.
Women’s Voices
Women’s Voices is a 12-week songwriting and performance residency designed and led entirely by women, for women. Developed by Street Symphony in partnership with the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC) in Los Angeles—the only service organization on Skid Row exclusively dedicated to supporting women experiencing homelessness—the program invites participants to write, rehearse, and perform original songs that tell their stories in their own words.
Impact
Over a Decade of Healing Through Music
Street Symphony has brought live music, human connection, and creative community to our neighbors experiencing homelessness, incarceration, addiction, and recovery in Skid Row. What began as a single act of service has grown into a sustained movement built on trust, artistic excellence, and the belief that everyone deserves access to beauty and belonging.
every donation helps!11+
years of continuous service in Los Angeles
10,000+
people reached through performances, workshops, and community programs
200+
artists in the Street Symphony creative community
1,000+
live music events delivered in Skid Row
5
long-standing monthly programs with trusted Skid Row partners
