The Youth choir of the Foundation Come Along!

The youth choir of the Foundation Come Along! brings together young people, comprising singers with blindness, visual impairment, intellectual or physical disabilities. Altogether, we are a group of 22 young people, aged 14-35, and we have a passion for singing.

We rehearse once per week, as our members live in different cities, including Aizpute, Balvi, Rēzekne, Dobele, Cēsis and Sigulda. The choir is led by conductor Rūdolfs Bērtiņš, and our singers’ vocal skills are honed by pedagogue Valda Dzene.

In the past four years, the choir’s vocal ability has strengthened because of our perseverance and effort. We also strive to organise our own concerts: we visit retirement homes to bring joy to the elderly people, we participate in choral friendship concerts. We have also recorded the CD Come Along and Sing in Europe!, which includes songs in 12 European languages.

However, our future goal is to participate in the Latvian Song and Dance Festival in the year of our country’s centenary. We want to show that people with special needs, too, can be a part of the great joint choir of the Song Festival. Our choir does not receive any support from the state or the municipality – we are able to sustain our work with the help of donations. Therefore, to be able to take part in the festival, we need financial support to cover rent for practice rooms, to remunerate our pedagogues, and rent a bus for getting to the collective rehearsals of the Song Festival. We also need to think about sewing costumes for the singers.

However, we do believe that we will find forthcoming hearts, and in 2018, we will stand next to thousands of Latvian singers on the Grand Stage in Mežaparks.