Carnegie Hall Official Shines in Efforts to Reach Out

Vincent Schiraldi, commissioner of New York City’s Department of Probation, says he expects a lot of surprises on the job. Yet he was stunned nonetheless a few years back when he got a call from Carnegie Hall.

The legendary music organization’s top education and outreach officer, Sarah Johnson, wanted to meet with Mr. Schiraldi to discuss including kids who were in trouble with the law in Musical Connections, a program she helped create at Carnegie that engages people in difficult circumstances in song writing and performing.

When Ms. Johnson went to meet Mr. Schiraldi the following week, he was struck.

“I couldn’t believe that Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Hall, the world’s most famous music venue, was so open, so grass roots,” he says. “And Sarah was fearless and passionate. She wanted to work together with us at every level.”

Since then, the partnership between Carnegie’s Weill Music Institute, which Ms. Johnson directs, and Mr. Schiraldi’s office, which oversees 26,000 youths and adults on probation, has grown to include not only song-writing programs and concerts at juvenile-justice facilities but also joint work on a $1-million grant from the Open Society Foundations to develop arts-based community projects in seven city neighborhoods. Together, the two groups also applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant, though they ultimately did not win the award.

“Many of the best ideas about what we are doing together come from brainstorming with Sarah, who works with people and ideas with arms open,” Mr. Schiraldi says, echoing a sentiment shared by Ms. Johnson’s colleagues inside and outside Carnegie.

‘Spirit of Collaboration’

Her collaborative leadership style in building Musical Connections—which works with the Department of Probation and 20 other social-service agencies in the city—and other innovative programs at Carnegie were key to her being chosen this year’s winner of the Independent Sector’s American Express NGen Leadership Award for nonprofit leaders under age 40.

“It is her spirit of collaboration that we feel can truly help to transform efforts of the broader arts community to engage citizens in the arts,” Amanda Broun, an Independent Sector spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.

For her part, Ms. Johnson, age 38, says she comes by her inclination toward teamwork naturally, tracing it back to her roots as an oboist performing in orchestras and chamber-music groups.

“To be a musician is to be collaborative by nature, to learn how to listen really well to everyone around you,” Ms. Johnson says.

Among other leadership traits she credits to her musical background: her penchant for inquiry and her interest in measurement and assessment.

“A musician is constantly trying something in the practice room and then trying to do it better, which is the goal of evaluation work and measuring impact,” Ms. Johnson says.

A Challenging Instrument

Ms. Johnson first picked up the oboe when she was 10 years old, encouraged by her school’s band leader, who deemed her “determined enough” to take on the instrument. The oboe looks like a clarinet but has a double reed in place of a mouthpiece, so is harder to play.

In rural Northern Illinois where she grew up, her first oboe teacher was a dairy farmer; by middle school she was traveling more than an hour from home for more professional training on a college campus; and for high school she attended a boarding school for the arts.

Study at the Juilliard School came next, and while earning her master’s degree there, Ms. Johnson became a founding member of the woodwind quintet Ariel Winds.

Ariel Winds performed around the country, coupling its programs with classroom teaching and community outreach. Those experiences, along with short stints as a teaching artist at the New York Philharmonic and doing educational outreach at the 92nd Street Y, solidified Ms. Johnson’s desire to shift her aspirations from being a professional musician to doing nonprofit work.

“I started thinking beyond the performance and education components of music and was inspired by how music can and should play a larger role in addressing critical social issues and problems, like those related to justice and health,” she says.

The first place she plied her new trade was at the Philadelphia Orchestra, where she was hired in 2003 as director of education and community partnerships. There, she quickly built on plans in the works for a free concert series in the nearby city of Camden, N.J., adding a program to involve older people and teenagers in creating musical projects that helped them express their feelings about their troubled neighborhoods.

Synthesizing Ideas

At Carnegie, where she has been since 2007, Ms. Johnson is credited with leading her team to create Musical Connections; to organize America’s first National Youth Orchestra in more than 70 years; and to greatly expand a free music-education curriculum, called Link Up, which is now being used by 58 orchestras in four countries.

Tom Cabaniss, a composer and educator who has worked with Ms. Johnson at the New York Philharmonic and at Carnegie, says Ms. Johnson stands out for her ability to synthesize important ideas and then bring together diverse players—like artists, charity officials, and community leaders—to build on them.

Carnegie’s two-year-old Lullaby Project, for example, grew out of an “aha!” moment for Ms. Johnson that Mr. Cabaniss witnessed during a Carnegie meeting with staff members from a New York City hospital. The group was talking about a song-writing program aimed at kids affected by HIV, when an obstetrics nurse in attendance expressed interest in bringing music to her department. Ms. Johnson quickly seized on the notion, making suggestions that led to the Lullaby Project, which pairs teenage mothers-to-be with Carnegie musicians who help them write and produce their own lullabies.

“That’s Sarah’s mind,” Mr. Cabaniss says. At Carnegie, “we had been talking, more abstractly, about different song forms, including lullabies, but Sarah took it one step further and identified a way for real social engagement around it.”

The aim of such programs, Ms. Johnson explains, is not just a feel-good exposure to music. The Lullaby Project, for example, is intended to help foster bonds between mothers and their babies. The program with the Department of Probation helps participants learn commitment, discipline, and cooperation and gives them an opportunity to interact with their probation officers around a positive activity.

“We are constantly asking the question: How can we serve those in acute need?” Ms. Johnson says of her work at Carnegie. “And then we ask, What can music bring to those particular challenges?”

Sarah Johnson, Director, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute

Her job: Overseeing Carnegie’s education and community-outreach department, with a full-time staff of 23 plus a number of part-time musicians, teaching artists, and consultants, and an annual budget of roughly $10-million

Background: An oboist with a master’s degree in performance from the Juilliard School, Ms. Johnson moved into a career in arts-organization administration because she wanted to marry her passions for music and social advocacy.

Advice she tweeted to aspiring nonprofit leaders: