Charli Kemp, Founder of Change the Tune

Charli Kemp, a dynamic mood-music curator, is passionate about bringing people together using music and food. Throughout her youth, she created immaculate dinner parties with full playlists that brought home family members from far and wide. These festivities were the makings of warm, laughter-inducing memories. During her college years, Charli was deemed the go-to hostess for lively dinner parties. These events helped establish her long-held belief that music and food are key factors for creating bonds between people of varying backgrounds, lifestyles, and cultures.

 After college, Charli taught middle-school math and science in New York City through Teach for America, a non-profit that provides education in low-income communities and under-resourced public schools. During her five-year tenure, Charli developed experiential lesson plans that incorporated music and food into the curriculum, which significantly impacted student learning outcomes. Math classes were transformed into music-infused, high-energy, and hands-on cooking experiences where students applied mathematical concepts to the real-world necessity of meal planning and preparation.

Charli’s impact in the classroom led her to pursue an MBA at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business where she held several leadership positions and was a Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab Fellow. As a board member of the service club, Challenge for Charity, Charli helped organize volunteer efforts for local schools. As Co-President of Black Graduate Business Leaders, she coordinated the first-ever diversity conference at Marshall, and through Marshall Youth Outreach, mentored high-school youth. She also served as the organization’s VP of Finance.

After business school, Charli joined Green Dot Public schools, a non-profit working to transform public education for low-income, high-risk youth through high-achieving charter schools. Green Dot serves over 10,000 youth in the Los Angeles Area. Charli began at Green Dot as a Cluster Business Manager. She was the chief operating officer for a number of schools, supporting day-to-day non-academic operations and serving as the liaison between home-office departments and designated schools.

A desire to return to the experiential aspects of education positioned Charli for her next role at Green Dot Public Schools as its Leadership and Life Coordinator. In this role, Charli managed Green Dot’s social-emotional learning program and developed a strategic plan that included a framework to guide instructors on ways to integrate non-cognitive skills with academic instruction.  

Frustrated by systems of inequity that perpetuate negative narratives, Charli combined her leadership and business skills to launch the non-profit, Change the Tune, in 2017. As executive director of Change the Tune, Charli uses music and social impact to transform the negative social-cultural narratives that impact urban youth.