UPdate on DNCC & Q’s 4 the Network

Hey hey network–

It was PHENOM to hear about all the projects this morning!  I’ve been meaning to add to the blog for a minute, but finally hopping to it…

Our project at Dorchester Nazarene (DNCC) is going great.  So far we’ve been combining introductory music lessons (in trumpet & saxaphone) with poetry/spoken word.  We started by doing activities to build community in the group while looking at the role of music in social movements (with examples from Hip Hop in Senegal–where rappers put out electoral mix-tapes in 2000 and changed the political landscape of the country, Favela Rising (Brazil), Amandla! (South Africa), and Hip Hop in the US.  And I’m personally really excited to continue that convo next week when Hip Hop Media Lab (H2ML) will join us to talk about “Hip Hop as a Weapon.”

The DNCC youth chose to work on Youth Violence (close competitors were disproportionate School Funding and rising Costs of Living), and since then have been looking at the affects (e.g. deaths, injuries, trauma, depression, fear, prison, separated families, police escalation, lost dreams), the causes (drug trade/crime, people need money, jealousy in relationships, disrespect, presence of guns/weapons, demons/straying from God, etc.) and the deeper root causes of those causes (1. joblessness/poverty, 2. systemic/government racism, 3. people need dignity & respect in their own lives, and 4) gun companies & justice system profit from the crisis).

I wasn’t in the first training, but from looking at the materials, there were three main youth development goals for the CfC project… 1) Increase youth participation, 2) Develop youth’s skills/interests, and 3) Impact a social issue.  To me, it’s really important that the third one doesn’t get lost.  I want the youth to feel that they’ve tangibly affected the problem of Youth Violence.  I want them to feel their own power.  (To that end, we’ve been incorporating some activities around Youth Power, Youth Movements, and Adultism.)

The next thing that we did was to research groups who are explicitly working on Youth Violence in Boston (United Youth and Youth Workers, GBIO, Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, Street Worker Program of BCYF, and Boston Gun Buy Back).  We developed a list of strategies that people are working on so that we could support the strategies that we like.  We’re going to incorporate all these things–Affects of Youth Violence, Causes & Root Causes of Youth Violence, and Solutions to Youth Violence–into our poetry/spoken word.

Our next huge task is to figure out what exactly the final project will sound like and look like, where we’ll present it, and how we’ll use it to target specific people or groups who can help implement the Solutions to Youth Violence that we like.

I have a few questions for the folks out there in the network…

Do you have good spoken word activities to get people writing on specific topics?

Do you have specific hip hop (or otherwise) tracks that discuss violence in a progressive way?  (e.g. Pharoahe Monch’s “Hello my name’s Mr. Bullet” or Akrobatik’s “Remind my soul”)

What ways do you suggest we get our music onto the Ipod/computer of local policy-makers?

Peace,
Dave
davidvictorjenkins@gmail.com

p.s. sorry 4 long post

Posted by David Jenkins | October 28, 2008 

Comments

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.