YouthCUE has always been about collaboration. In fact, our first official name was – and officially still is – Youth Choirs Incorporated. The “incorporated” part was not so much about a business model as it was about the whole concept of sharing, collaboration, and mutual engagement, and shared benefits.
Nothing we provide our members is more collaborative than our programming. Take festivals, for instance. When we decide to offer a festival event to our directors and your choirs, we set out to secure a rehearsal/performance venue. Once the date is set, we then begin to market the event and seek to sell the festival to directors who will, in turn, register, prepare the students musically, and make the arrangements to travel to the festival location. Then, we contract the orchestra, make arrangements for food service, tee shirts, and a plethora of other details. Think about all the cooperation and teamwork which must take place in order to pull of an event of this magnitude. It’s an enormous group effort.
The pandemic not only wiped out all YouthCUE’s in-person events in 2020 and 2021 (except for the Baylor 2020 Festival, which we got in just under the wire before the world suddenly shut down), but the effects of COVID-19 have also made the startup of our events even more difficult than had there never been a break. Namely, our venues – these are the National Cathedral, Baylor University, and various churches which host our events – are all having to revisit their protocols to see what they are comfortable taking on these types of events in the future.
The reason why YouthCUE does not already have its 2022 events online for registration is because we are awaiting final permissions and invitations from our venues. So far (as of the writing of this article) have we received not one go-ahead from our hosts. The good news is that we have received “encouraging words” from all of these, and they are each bound by their own institutions to wait a bit longer to give the green lights.
As soon as those approvals are given, you’ll be seeing the 2022 events begin to appear on the website, and you’ll be able to register your groups immediately.
We look forward to serving you and your students in the months and years ahead. We have all come through a very difficult time of ministry and programming, and we hope and pray that we will soon be ready to move beyond where we were to a new place of possibilities, opportunities for music-making, and collaborative events.
Let us all remain patience, grateful, and forward-thinking as we anticipate the promise of a brighter future. Whatever the future specifically holds, I cannot help but believe that we will all be better off as we continue to collaborate and face our challenges together.
Please stay closely tuned to the website at youthcue.org for all the latest information as it becomes available.
Your grateful colleague,
Randy Edwards
