Creativity, confidence, collaboration: these are the seeds sown every semester in the classrooms of Building Beats, a nonprofit organization that has been providing DJ and music production workshops for youth in low-income communities in New York since 2013. From the street parties of the 70’s and 80’s whose community organizers were students to the computer-filled classrooms of over 50 New York schools, hip hop continues to teach young people to tap into their own voices while tapping into a legacy one of whose main messages is also that of transformation. “The goal of our program is to show that anyone can be creative,” says Building Beats co-founder and DJ Phi Pham. For Pham, music was a transformative tool, an idea that became central to his founding of Building Beats. Today, having taught more than 3,000 students, Pham and others at Building Beats continue to hope to inspire students to step out of their comfort zones in order to step into the unknown of their own creativity—and to join their voices to a musical tradition rooted in its own evolution.