Laura Barron is a musician, writer, facilitator and community artist whose 30-year career as a flutist has brought her from the Yukon to New Zealand, including solo appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and several performances at Carnegie Hall. She now harnesses her experience as a performer and teacher in her role as the Founder /Executive Director of Instruments of Change. This Vancouver-based non-profit leads numerous community arts initiatives that engage with incarcerated women in Canada, at-risk youth in India, educators in Zambia, and many other diverse groups. Here, she has found her greatest reach and impact designing experiences that empower underserved and often marginalized individuals to become instruments of change in their own lives as they find their own creative voices. Most meaningfully, she started the Vancouver branch of Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project, where she works with single mothers escaping violence, to co-create original songs for their children. Always striving for relevance in her work, she guides young artists to find intersections between their talents, passions and social concerns in ICASC’s Futures:forward initiative, as she did on the faculties of the Universities of OR, WI & N. AZ. She also facilitates climate action art projects for the Conservation Council of New Brunswick’s Harm to Harmony initiative, out of which her composition, Come Home – an ancient forest lullaby, emerged from a collaborative lyric-writing process that she led with tree activists across Canada. Laura accepts numerous public speaking invitations to share principles and best practices in Arts for Social Change. She is also a frequent blogger, most recently about artistic responses to the pandemic, globally, in These Adagio Days. And she brings all of her professional experiences together in her new writing project, Key Changes, a novel based on the healing power of music.
