Laura Shultz, the executive director of Harmony Project KC, was named this week as an honoree in the Missouri Arts Council’s Missouri Arts Awards for 2021.

Regarded as “the state’s highest honor in the arts,” the award recognized Shultz as “the architect of Harmony Project KC, the local iteration of a Los Angeles-born music program that through education and mentoring helps the community‘s most vulnerable children and their families.”

“Honorees,” the Missouri Arts Council said, “are recognized for their profound and lasting contributions to Missouri’s artistic and cultural legacy.”

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Shultz and her team of musicians and teachers have been reaching out to children in schools in Kansas City’s Northeast Neighborhood, where Schultz has been the executive director of the Northeast Community Center since 2008.

LINC’s Caring Communities program at Garfield Elementary School in the Kansas City Public Schools has partnered with Harmony Project KC to introduce many children to the arts, culminating in public concerts, even continuing their work virtually during the pandemic in 2020.

Harmony Project KC’s biography of Shultz traces her “varied professional life” as a Pediatric RN in the Peace Corps, a commercial photographer, business woman and a nonprofit leader. “As a music lover and youth advocate,” the biography said, Shultz “looks forward to continuing to enhance the lives of the children and families of the Northeast through the power of music education.​”