Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora are bringing people together through music

When acclaimed American sopranos Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora first met as opera stu- dents at Juilliard in the early 2000s, they not only bonded over their shared joy of music, but they also discovered they both wanted to contribute to their communities on a deeper level.
“Our hearts resonated with questions around the role that the arts could play in the capacity of healing,” Zamora says.

As fate would have it, when the horrific events of 9/11 transpired, Yunus and Zamora responded immediately by gathering a group of their friends to perform at Juilliard’s local firehouse, which had lost 12 of its 13 firefighters that morning. Singing for frontline heroes and their families, and nursing homes, witnessing how moved they were, the two friends recognized the strong impact that the arts could have in society, especially in times of crisis.

“Both of us had a desire to bring the excellence that we were cultivating in our tiny practice rooms at Juilliard to as many communities as possible, and to forge new creative connections,” Yunus explains.

And so, in 2006, at the beginning of their blossoming operatic careers, Yunus and Zamora co- founded Sing for Hope (SFH), a New York–based nonprofit organization dedicated to harnessing “the power of the arts to create a better world.” With an annual budget of $3 million, today, SFH brings a multitude of creative-arts-based programs to hundreds of thousands of people in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, transit hubs, treatment centers, community spaces, and refugee camps in the United States and worldwide.