With a successful track record of providing kids opportunities to form bands, learn instruments, write their own songs, and perform each summer dating back to 2018, the Flint Rocks Youth Empowerment (FRYE) Music Camp has no problem filling its free camp each year – in fact, this year’s camp, which runs July 27-31, filled up and required a wait list within about 48 hours after registration opened.
Now what they need is support for this year’s cohort of campers, which includes a lot of newcomers to the program.
“Of the 30 registered, there are less than half that are returning campers,” said Julie Hugunin, program coordinator for FRYE and a musician and music teacher. “The rest are all new, and they’re on the young side. So I’m looking forward to a very energetic group. It’s gonna be a lot like the first years where it was so brand new. For a while, we had a lot of veterans. They knew how it worked. This is gonna be a different kind of exciting because many of these kids have never experienced anything like this before.”
FRYE is a 5-day camp for kids ages 10-16. During those five days, they learn to play instruments, form bands, write songs, create their own logos and merch designs, and at the end of the camp, get to perform on the stage of Flint Local 432 and during the annual GOODSTOCK festival in Carriage Town.
Hugunin recruits a diverse team of professional musicians and teachers to work with students each year, feeds students and staff, has to account for instrument replacements and repairs, storage when the camps end, and other costs. FRYE also provides a stipend for a social worker to be present during camp, to assist any students with special needs and to assist teachers in reaching and supporting those students.
Hugunin also hopes to one day be able to afford to provide students who show skill or passion for an instrument with those instruments at the end of a session if they can’t afford their own.
“What I would love to do if we had a surplus, is if there’s a kid that shows a particular aptitude and interest and does not have the means to get their own instrument, I will give them one,” she said. “Sometimes you just see how this is gonna save a kid’s sanity, save their life even. I would love to be able to go, ‘You know, that bass looks really good on you. How about you take it home?’ But I can’t do that if I don’t have money to replace it for the program.”
Some of those program needs are met through partnerships – FRYE is a Food Bank of Eastern Michigan ‘Meet Up and Eat Up’ location in the summer, for example, so some meals to students are provided through that. But in order to offset other costs, she’s organized several ways people can give back and support the program prior to camp starting:
- FRYE Double Good Gourmet Popcorn Sale: The sale lasts from noon on June 1-noon on June 8. If you shop the link between the dates, 50 percent of the sale goes to FRYE and all orders ship directly to buyers. The other 50 percent is distributed by Double Good to other programs for special needs kids across the country, including an option to donate popcorn to teachers.
- FRYE Music Trivia Fundraiser at Sloan Museum Of Discovery: The event is Sunday, June 28, at 5 p.m. and includes prizes donated by local businesses and organizations, including Wandering Lantern Productions, Sauce Italian American Kitchen, Queen’s Provisions, and more. All the music clues will be played live by members of Hugunin’s band, Thistle Groove Collective. Tickets can be purchased online and include entry, a FRYE commemorative rainbow bracelet, a FRYE refrigerator magnet made at Factor Two, and five free raffle tickets. The first 25 sales will also get a FRYE Tote bag printed at Factory Two. Seating is limited. Food will be available for purchase and there will be a cash bar.
- Donations can be made directly to FRYE through their GoFundMe page.
- Sponsorship packages are available, ranging in level from $100 to $1,000. Reach out to piano.singer.julie@gmail.com for more info on how to become a sponsor.
Each year, Hugunin sees a group of students grow in their confidence as musicians and working with other students. However, now that the camp has its own extensive history, she’s also been able to see students spend several years in the camp and now participate by lending their expertise and helping teach younger kids in the program.
“I have so many alumni that are going to be running the camp this year, so it’s a different kind of excitement,” Hugunin said. “It’s watching your kids grow up and carry on in your place. It’s kind of the coolest thing ever. I’m not a grandparent, but I imagine it’s the closest thing to that without actually having it, being able to watch kids that we helped and taught pass on the lessons that we taught them but with their own spin on it and connect to this younger generation in a way that we can’t.”
That knowledge from students is a critical component of FRYE. The approach to teaching is collaborative, with student input a major part of the experience.
“We have adults running it, but it is a collaborative effort amongst everybody involved from the students right on up to the staff,” Hugunin said. “There’s no ‘what we say goes.’ It’s, ‘This is what we’re thinking. How do you guys feel about that?’ And we take their input seriously. I don’t know of too many other camps that do that.”
The goal is to provide tools and teaching for students to improve at their craft, but also encourage them to take ownership of the band concepts and projects they work on and gain the confidence to articulate their vision. Hugunin and her staff are also always working on creative ways to enhance their programming – she said that a new aspect of the camp this year will be learning from spoken word artists on how to enhance their lyrics while writing songs.
Sola Noir and Kirei, two local spoken word artists, are participating in this year’s camp as lyrical coaches. Hugunin connected with them last summer during a community event in Civic Park.
“The kids have gotten better and better at writing songs, but the thing that has always been a hang-up is lyrics,” Hugunin said. “They have an idea of what they want to say, but they don’t know how to form the lyrics. And last summer at Civic Park, we saw spoken word poets get up and speak, and two of them are coming to join us this summer for a couple of days to help the kids write their lyrics, so I’m very excited about that.”
Donations to the program help continue to make sure it provides a free, safe space for kids to create each summer, get to know and work with kids from other communities in the area, and build something together while gaining confidence.
“It is probably the purest sense of community I have ever witnessed,” Hugunin said. “Since they’re coming from all different schools, they don’t really know each other unless they were at camp last year. We’ve established that this is a community where everybody’s voice matters. There’s no hierarchy. There’s no in-crowd cliques. Everybody’s on even ground. You can’t help but walk away from it really inspired, knowing that these are the kids that are going to inherit what we leave behind, and seeing what they can do in a week’s time, you just can’t help but be inspired that they might actually save us from ourselves.”
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