How 2024 Tony Nominees Kelli O'Hara and Brandon Victor Dixon Use Their Voices to Help Kids with 'So Much to Say' (Exclusive)

The Broadway veterans hosted the 22nd annual SAY Gala in New York City on May 6

Few people know the power of speaking up as much as stage performers, who act and sing in front of live audiences for a living.

Kelli O’Hara and Brandon Victor Dixon are no exceptions. Tony-winner O’Hara just nabbed her eighth nomination for her performance in Days of Wine and Roses, while Dixon was recognized for a third time thanks to his role in Hell’s Kitchen.

For O’Hara, scoring the nod amid a season of such talent is what she calls “an embarrassment of riches,” while Dixon recalls the first thing that went through his mind when he heard the news.

“You've got to be kidding me," he tells PEOPLE with a laugh.

When the pair aren’t busy delighting audiences on Broadway, they can be found singing for a shared cause on a different kind of stage.

On May 6, the pair hosted the 22nd annual gala for the Stuttering Association for the Young (SAY), where they sang alongside the organization’s participants in a night meant to raise awareness and funding for children who stutter.

For O’Hara, the biggest obstacle in her more than two decades of involvement with SAY, which was founded by Taro Alexander, has been trying to dismantle the notion that “there's a level of intelligence that's different because someone stutters.”

“It's just not the case,” she says. “I mean, they are such brilliant minds with so much insight. You just give them time.”

Dixon echoes his co-host's sentiment.

“Once I saw the [kids] begin to face the challenge of stuttering, it just struck me immediately what this could do to a child without the proper resources to understand that it's okay,” he says. “When I see the kids engaged in artistic pursuit, when I see them singing, and I see the stutter and their fear wash away? This is significant, and it works.”

“It's easy for young people, or any one of us, to come up in our world and feel that there isn’t a good place for our voice and for our opinion. Maybe we don't know enough or we aren't strong enough,” Dixon adds. “We have to recognize that there is space for us all.”

One of the night’s honorees was improv hip-hop group Freestyle Love Supreme, founded by Anthony Veneziale and Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2004. Members Christopher Jackson (a Hamilton alum), Veneziale, and performer Chris Sullivan were on hand to accept the award.

The improv group recently kicked off year-round programming collaboration with SAY and works with children who stutter at the organization's summer camp, Camp SAY.

“I think our work as this collective, it's always fostered that the very spirit of the improv that we participate in,” Jackson tells PEOPLE. “‘It is all about shining lights and making people aware, not to separate folks that need more help, more awareness, but to give them more room to create space and creativity.”

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