The volunteer singers of the Gulf Coast Community Choir have been lifting their voices in performance for 25 years. Along the way, they’ve also helped to lift the area’s nonprofits, donating proceeds from an annual fund-raising concert to beneficiaries including All Faiths Food Bank, Pines Nursing Home, and Children First, among many others.

This year’s anniversary concert is set to take place at 4 p.m. April 27 at Trinity United Methodist Church on Shade Avenue in Sarasota, and it will direct proceeds to Billionaire Babies, an organization dedicated to fostering financial literacy and a lifelong love of learning in children, and the Manasota Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) Freedom School, a free program that provides accurate lessons in African culture and African American history to pre-K through 12^th-grade students of all backgrounds.

The latter cause is especially close to the hearts of this multicultural choir, which began its work back in 2001 with a concert benefiting the local chapter of the NAACP. Initially, founder Dr. Carroll Buchanan, a Juilliard-trained musician and composer, and his wife, longtime educator Carol Poteat-Buchanan, did not intend for the choir’s concertizing to extend beyond that first year. But, says choir director Karen Chester-Amengor, who’s been with the GCCC since the beginning, “We got such rave reviews, people kept asking Dr. Buchanan, ‘Don’t you want to make it official?’ So we became the Gulf Coast Community Choir, with an ongoing mission to lift our voices for charities.”

Chester-Amengor and GCCC president James Lawrence hasten to say that, while many of its members have grown their singing talents in their churches or synagogues, the choir is a secular one. “We do all types of music,” says Lawrence, who began singing with the choir about 15 years ago. “At first, Dr. Buchanan didn’t want to let me in the choir,” he recalls with a chuckle, “because I couldn’t read music. But then he called me because he had a shortage of deep voices. He asked me to prepare a song, and when I did it he said, ‘I think you’ll do.’”

Lawrence, who became president of GCCC when Carol Poteat-Buchanan passed away, says, “When I first joined, I was going through chemotherapy, so it was something of a godsend for me to be in the choir. It gave me something to do and focus on. That’s why I’ll do whatever I can to make the choir work.”

Under Chester-Amengor’s direction, the choir or smaller ensembles from it perform throughout the year at retirement and nursing homes and churches and even did a stint at Florida Studio Theatre in association with a production there of The Best of Enemies. She’s a full-time teacher at Brookside Middle School, but music has always been a crucial part of her life, as it was for her mother and grandmother before her.

The GCCC, she says, “is a very diverse group of adult singers, with different religious backgrounds and sexual orientations, although right now we don’t have a lot of diversity in age. Some years, we do have student singers, but not this year. Despite those things that would usually separate people, music brings us together. Politics and religion take a back seat.”

Chester-Amengor leads the 35-member choir in their rehearsals, typically a couple of hours once a week, with extra preparation on occasion. While the final program for the April 27 concert is not yet set in stone, she says, “When we perform we always make sure we provide our listeners with a wide variety, any genre you can name—country, folk, gospel, Broadway show tunes, classical, some opera. Procuring the music takes a lot of time. I would like to sing whatever genre there is, but finding the music and the vocal parts is not always an easy task.”

Audience members at the yearly concert tend to be friends, family and those with connections to sororities, fraternities or houses of worship through the singers. This year, a family member representing the original leaders, the Buchanans, will also do a special presentation.

Chester-Amengor estimates more than $50,000 has gone back into the community due to the annual concert, distributed through 35 nonprofits. Applications to be considered are reviewed by a committee and the choir board before a vote is taken. 

For more information about the concert or to support the Gulf Coast Community Choir, reach out to Lawrence at [email protected], or visit gulfcoastcommunitychoir.org.