Cole Rassin

Cole Rassin was a songwriter from Wilmington, North Carolina. He picked up a guitar young, named it Betty, and started writing. Between 2012 and 2014 he published eleven original songs to his own YouTube channel, registered several of them with BMI, and built a small community online who called themselves the Rassinators.

He was writing his way through things a lot of us are still learning how to name. In his own video description for a song called Beautiful, he said he wrote it "for anyone who's down on themselves and needs to be cheered up and know that they're beautiful because they are who they are." That's who he was writing for. That's still who we're writing for.

Cole died in February 2018 at age 22. In the months that followed, his friend Hannah Kol — a singer, songwriter, and Berklee College of Music graduate — took six of his unfinished songs into a Nashville studio and recorded them as the album Sunny Day. Its release party at the Brooklyn Arts Center in Wilmington became the launch event for Music Heals Minds.

Every guitar we donate, every therapist we fund, every instrument placed in a rehab hospital or SHORE program classroom, carries Cole's name. The songs on his channel are still there. The ones Hannah finished are still playing. Cole wrote for everyone broken and lost at some point. Music Heals Minds funds the therapy and the instruments that meet people there.