Musicians for Community is a student-founded organization dedicated to creating an evidence-based implementation of arts-based public health interventions through Cultural Agency Model and community engagement to improve health and community wellbeing, while providing young musicians meaningful opportunities to perform live concerts and gain leadership in cultural advocacy.

We use a “Train-the-Trainer” approach to help student musicians become cultural facilitators. Guided by the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance (RE-AIM) framework, performers learn to apply the Cultural Agency Model with evidence-based implementation techniques to bridge the gap between arts and public health science, as well as foster wellbeing among vulnerable populations and underserved communities.

Founded by students at Brookline High School, we organize regular concerts to share the emotional, cultural, and social benefits of music at local venues including senior centers, community organizations, libraries, and other community venues. By creating spaces where musicians can grow through performance and leadership, and communities can come together through shared listening, we seek to strengthen wellbeing, foster connection, and uplift those around us. One performance at a time, we aim to develop a scalable and effective approach to cultivate a more compassionate, vibrant, and inclusive community.

The Members of Musicians for Community

William Yang Xuan is a scholar-musician and advocate dedicated to bridging the gap between clinical research and community-based resilience. A classically trained pianist with a decade of performance experience, William founded Musicians for Community with the belief that the arts are not merely an aesthetic luxury, but a key complement to sciences as well as a vital component of public health intervention.

Driven by his own experiences and his research internships at Boston University and Harvard Medical School, William applied the Cultural Agency Model with implementation science methods (e.g., RE-AIM: Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance) to transform traditional musical performance into evidence-based tools for social cohesion and mental well-being. His work enables aspiring young musicians to become cultural facilitators to lead their own arts-based community initiatives and aims to provide a “biopsychosocial buffer” for vulnerable populations, including the elderly and students in the METCO program.

Beyond the concert hall and the lab, William has a strong voice in local and national scientific advocacy. He is a solo author in Nature and Science, where his published correspondence addresses critical issues in federal research funding and the sustainability of the scientific talent pipeline. He also spearheaded a national petition that garnered over 600 signatures across the country to protect NIH and NSF funding. He continues to refine his toolkit and expand the reach of Musicians for Community, striving to empower the next generation of "scholar-citizens" to use their unique talents for the public good.