We are excited to announce that, for the first time in the school’s history, The People’s Music School now has a home of our own on the Greater South Side: 5410 S State Street!
We will be holding our Greater South Side programming this fall from this new program site in Washington Park, and we can’t wait to welcome our community to this beautiful new space.
This new location is an important milestone for our organization and community. Launched in 2016 at the Gary Comer Youth Center with just 15 students, our GSS program has grown more than 10 times over the past 10 years and serves over 180 students today. In the past three years alone, the program has grown by 40%, and it continues to demonstrate strong student year over year retention, excellent musical outcomes, and growing demand.
We are overjoyed to finally have a GSS program space that can meet this demand – one we can finally call our own.
“It has been exciting for me to launch the Greater South Side (GSS) program and guide its 10x growth,” says Chief Program Officer Natalie Butler. “As we prepare to celebrate a decade of offering our amazing GSS program to Chicago’s Southside youth, it’s great to finally have a home we can call our own. Our beautiful new location at 5410 S State Street will serve our current 180 students in the kind of educational setting they deserve to experience, and ensure we have the space to offer hundreds more children the opportunity to participate in our transformational after school music program.”
Located in the former ACE Amandla Charter School, our new Greater South Side program site is wonderfully equipped to host our ever-growing GSS program – with 9 classrooms for music instruction, plus a reception area, staff office, faculty resource center, kitchen, bathrooms, elevators, and instrument storage rooms.
We can’t wait to start the school year off at our new GSS site!