Permission to Be Loud
A personal story about how music became a source of power and led to building Amplify, a program empowering girls through creativity and belonging.
The First Time Music Felt Like Power
The first time music made me feel powerful, I was a shy kid alone in my room, listening to Exile in Guyville on repeat, trying to understand how someone could be that honest and that unafraid at the same time.
I didn’t have the language for feminism yet. I hadn’t even had my first crush. But something in my body shifted.
It didn’t just sound good. It felt like permission.
Permission to take up space.
Permission to be loud.
And permission to say the quiet parts out loud.
That moment cracked something open in me, and I’ve been chasing it ever since.
Music as a Lifeline
It started with riot grrrl, distorted guitars, and handwritten lyrics that felt like secret messages passed between girls. Bikini Kill. Babes in Toyland. Sleater-Kinney.
Music wasn’t background noise. It became a lifeline. It was how I learned that power could be embodied, messy, emotional, and mine.
I grew up in a family of musicians, where storytelling and music were woven into everyday life. I played guitar, loved to sing, and eventually started writing my own songs.
Those songs became journal entries. Snapshots of an inner world no one else was seeing.
The shy girl everyone thought they knew wasn’t the whole story.
What I didn’t know then was that this relationship with music would eventually grow into something much bigger than me.
The Moment Everything Clicked
Amplify didn’t begin as a plan. It didn’t begin as a nonprofit. It began as a seed planted in lived experience.
Years later, after bouncing between jobs and trying to figure out what a “career” was supposed to look like, I was sitting in my car at a stop sign on my way to meet my mom at the farmer’s market.
A song came on the radio, I don’t even remember which one, and I just started crying.
It suddenly felt painfully obvious.
I had to do something with music.
And I had to do something that meant something.
How had I never seen this before?
Music wasn’t separate from who I was. It was who I was. It had held me through my most formative years, given me language when I didn’t have it, and helped me feel powerful long before the world was ready to hand that feeling to me.
Over time, that realization slowly grew into the first iteration of what would eventually become Amplify.
This work has never been just a job. It’s my whole heart.
What Amplify Really Is
At its core, Amplify is about creating the conditions for young people to feel that same permission I felt sitting on my bedroom floor with headphones on.
Permission to exist fully.
To be heard.
To trust their instincts.
To tell their own stories.
We work with girls+ through summer camps, after-school programs, wellness retreats, songwriting labs, teaching artist residencies, and live music production.
But what we’re really doing is youth development through creativity.
One of the most rewarding parts of this work is watching young people grow up inside these spaces and then step into leadership themselves.
There’s a staff member named Zadie who embodies this more than I could ever explain. She spent her childhood at Amplify, moved into leadership as a teen, and has now been on staff for five years.
Watching her grow into her confidence and her ability to hold space for others has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.
It’s quiet proof that when you invest in young people deeply and consistently, they carry that investment forward.
Why This Work Matters Right Now
We run programs year-round across Southern California, and one of my favorite partnerships is our teaching artist residency in New Cuyama with Blue Sky Center.
It’s a former oil town turned agricultural community where access to arts education is limited. For many kids there, this is their primary exposure to music and art.
Access matters.
And arts education improves nearly every measurable outcome in youth development, especially for young people still forming their sense of self.
Right now, that support is more important than ever.
Teenage girls’ mental health is at an all-time low. Kids are anxious, isolated, and carrying far more than they should have to.
We know this. And yet funding for preventative, arts-based programming continues to shrink.
At the same time, this past year alone, Amplify lost over $200,000 in funding. Federal support for our teen wellness retreat was pulled because preventative arts programming isn’t seen as essential.
That disconnect feels devastating, especially when the need has never been greater.
The Young People Who Stay With Me
Over the years, more than 15,000 young people have come through our programs, and so many of them have changed me.
Rory, who started as a camper and is now staff, teaches me daily what it means to be truly present with someone.
Pen flew from upstate New York to California every summer as a teen to study photography and is now majoring in it in New York City.
Ary, a foster youth who came to camp at ten, found power behind the drums as a teen, her confidence radiating through every hit.
These are the moments that stay with you.
Belonging Is Something You Can See
Youth have to be at the center of their own development. Especially teens. Buy-in matters.
I often tell them, “I built this place for you. How do you want it to look and feel?”
And the truth is, I almost always defer to their answers.
They are smart. They are intuitive. They understand the world they’re inheriting far better than we do.
Real belonging is visible.
It looks like shoulders dropping, genuine smiles, eye contact, laughter that comes easily. It takes time for kids to trust that a space is truly safe, but once they do, you see them relax into themselves.
Silly. Creative. Free.
Getting a real break from social media, pressure, and the constant noise of the world.
I can’t imagine a better way to spend a life than witnessing that transformation again and again.
A Belief System, Not Just a Program
What continues to surprise me is that I only fall more deeply in love with this work over time.
The hope is in the songs young people are writing, the art they’re creating, and the care they show for themselves and their communities. It’s in their bravery and vulnerability. It’s in their refusal to disappear.
Arts funding is more at risk right now than it has been in a long time. Nonprofits have always had to do more with less, but the margins are getting thinner.
I often ask people to imagine a world without music. Without art. To think about what those things have given them. And then to imagine young people losing access to that entirely.
Amplify is many things. Summer camps in Ojai. After-school programs in Pasadena. Wellness retreats. Songwriting labs. Teaching artist residencies. Live shows supporting women in music.
But at its core, it’s a belief system.
Much of how I think about this work has been shaped by Black feminist thinkers, especially adrienne maree brown, whose writing reminds us that being visionary requires staying rooted in the world as it is while daring to imagine what it could become.
That tension lives at the heart of Amplify.
We’re grounded in the real lives, needs, and struggles of young people, while constantly making space for them to imagine something freer, louder, and more honest.
That’s the work.
And it’s work I’m grateful to do every single day.
Warmthness,
Jen
