Women's Audio Mission

Women’s Audio Mission advances girls, women, and gender-diverse people in the fields of music production, music performance, and the recording arts. This organizational effectiveness grant supports internal capacity building to deepen the organization’s awareness, knowledge, skill, policies and practices around equity, inclusion, and diversity. Strengthening an organizations’ equity-focused competencies supports its practices and outcomes and contributes to a Bay Area arts ecosystem that has examined and reflects an understanding of equity in the arts. Support for Women’s Audio Mission advances the Performing Arts Program’s Youth strategy and Program Delivery substrategy.

Women’s Audio Mission advances girls, women, and gender-diverse people in the fields of music production, music performance, and the recording arts. Each year the organization provides more than 4,000 people with classes, workshops, performances, conferences, and career development and placement programs. A majority of the people it works with are girls aged 11 through 18, most of whom are people of color, low-income, and have few opportunities to participate in rigorous creative and digital media production training outside of Women’s Audio Mission. The organization also provides a low-cost, high-quality recording environment for independent artists and classes for adults. Support for Women’s Audio Mission aligns with the Performing Arts Program’s Youth strategy and Program Delivery substrategy.

Women’s Audio Mission (WAM) is dedicated to the advancement of women and girls in music production and the recording arts, a field in which women are chronically invisible and represent fewer than 5% of the sector. Founded in San Francisco in 2003, WAM provides free and low-cost recording-arts training to more than 250 girls and women each year in the world’s only professional recording studio run entirely by women. The organization lost its lease on its facility and recently purchased a new studio. WAM is now engaged in a $2 million capital campaign over two years. With the grant, WAM will surpass 60% of its fundraising goals to establish its first permanent home.