As a New Orleans kid, Coty Raven Morris doesn’t distinguish between learning music and learning anything else.

“What I learned about history, about my culture, about other people’s culture, I learned it in songs and play,” she said.

“When I was in New Orleans, there was no specific music class,” she said. “Everything was sung.”

“When people sing together, you see them getting rid of the mask of insecurity.”

As an adult, she studied the performance and music theory of choruses, but she was still thinking about how to live through music rather than downgrading it to the life bar. At one point, she found herself in a seminar on fairness where she found “tired and bored” and “divorce from the people she was talking about.”

"It looks a bit like 45 minutes makes people feel introverted," Morris said. "The room is made up of major white people who are interested in learning. I think introverted just paralyzing them from the conversation."

When she expressed her complaint to her, the instructor turned the question to her - what would she do to promote equity?

“I just help people promote conversation,” she said. “Put different people in the same room and let them really express it, ‘Hi, this is my name. This is my pronoun. I come from this place. This is my race. This is my race and incorporates it into the cutting-edge conversations between architecture and Rapport and Community.”

"As a topic that comes when the world is on fire," she said.

This conversation will allow her to develop her own music philosophy and courses – a kind of guided her work that brings people together to perform music as an act of social justice.

“When people sing together, you see them removing the mask of insecurity,” Morris said.

Teach the community to sing

Now, Morris is a choir and music education professor at Portland State University, and has been nominated for the Grammy Music Education Awards twice, in part because of her work organizing singing events.

Several times a year, members of different local choirs and public gather in what she calls a community singing. Some have been performing together for years, others have no experience.

People often told her that they could not sing. "I said, 'First of all, you haven't made me a teacher yet.'

"Second, someone told you that you can't sing. Someone took one of the most healing things in your body."

Sorry, they told you, she told them. “It’s time to go to work now.”

"I heard Professor Morris speak and say, 'I'm going to go back to school and become a choir teacher.'

On the night when a recent community sang, hundreds of people gathered at a church in downtown Portland. There Apollo Fernweh leads the Blueprint Ensemble Art Youth Choir. He earned a German degree, but hearing Morris’ conversation four years ago changed the entire trajectory of his life.

He recalled, “I said, ‘I’m going to go back to school and become a choir teacher. Because that guy is great, I want to learn from them.’

The night when the community sings was Fernweh’s first time with a crowd of people, and when he came on stage he quickly instructed the youth choir and the crowd to sing in two parts.

Ethan Sperry was there that night. He runs a chorus program in Portland and actually hires Morris. The decision, he said, was "perhaps the best thing that happened to me professionally."

Sperry said he called more than 70 people to seek the right people after getting funding for a music education position. "I knew after my first conversation," he said of Morris. "That's the guy I want to hire."

The work is to lead music education in Portland and expand the program “so that our students can better utilize the choir to build communities in impoverished areas.”

Sperry said Other homeless choir models The Inner City Choir (helping people in marginalized demographics) inspired him to build his own community through music.

He said the community began at Portland State University, where he observed choir members listening and sympathizing with each other.

“The graduation rate of choir students is much higher than the overall population,” he said.

“We are a mixed bag”

Retired biology teacher Rich Hanson said that for his music is the path not taken. He sings in church and school choirs, but he believes science will be a more practical option, which will lead to steady income.

"I regret it a little bit," Hansen said.

Now, he likes to participate in singing activities and watch his granddaughter sing in the youth choir. He smiled and said, "We're a mixed bag here, it's amazing." Looking at the audience, he said, "We have a wonderful tapestry of humanity."

At the end of the concert, dozens of people on the stage sang a song called “We Are One”. The singers include college students with blue hair, mother and daughter from Eritrea, and a woman with walkers and oxygen tanks.

She is one of the most passionate singers.

The lyrics say, “When we laugh, sing, when we cry, we are one.”