Words Beats & (My) Life part VI: The Embassy of Hip-Hop
Over the last five years we have been able to share our learning to engage young people in Africa (Senegal, Uganda and South Africa), Asia (Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and South Korea), Europe (Brussels, England, France), and South America (Brazil). In all of these places we found organizations just like WBL, serving little boys and girls of color. We were often invited to provide master teachers, or host capacity building trainings. We are now working to develop public art strategies in Pakistan, introducing new contemporary American dance forms in Korea, and developing commercial ties with the organizations we work with. We believe that economic development has to be at the heart of our organization-to-organization collaborations. It is not enough to just teach, we have to invest in the work we believe in, and create two-way exchanges.
It is for this reason that we have created a new approach that outlines a four to five year commitment to working in each country. In the first year of working in a country, we send teaching artists for master classes. They lead master classes in community spaces, universities, and art schools. This allows us to connect through culture and create shared experiences and opportunities for peer-to-peer learning.
In the second year, WBL hosts a retreat for teaching artists, arts managers and creatives to build their capacity to make/raise money, evaluate their programming, scale up their programming and develop partnerships. As part of the retreat we provide seed funding for a project and in year three we will invite the leaders of that project to come to the Washington D.C. to present their learning’s at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Words Beats & Life Festival. We have done this with organizations from Morocco, Uganda and Brussels.
In year three we commission the creation of a new WBL apparel inspired by textiles in that country. It is also in year three that the work of selected artists is added to the WBL shop for WBL staff to sell in America. We will buy their products in bulk and be their American distributer for one year. Our apprentice students are employed to fulfill those orders. The first two countries we have partnered with for this step are Pakistan and Uganda.
In the fourth year, we take advanced WBL Apprentice students to perform in the country, offering an opportunity for our students to collaborate with international artists while abroad and perform abroad in the process. This opportunity is available for currently enrolled students and alum. The first two countries to partner for this step were Korea and Brussels. This step in the process is important because for the first three years of the partnership our students have been learning about the organizations and communities we engage around the world. They know that their community is not just their block, and why we expect them “to rock the entire world.”
We have already completed the first three steps in Uganda. We expect to complete the four step in 2017/18 by taking apprentice students abroad. We know how transformative these travel experiences have been for the master artists we have been able to take abroad. We anticipate that taking apprentice students will be even more impactful, because it will be a student-to-student exchange.
One of the most important things about the international work WBL has done is the way it impacted our local and national programming. The number one question we were asked whenever working abroad was about money. How did we get it, how much did we have, and how did our student benefit. For most of our history our answers were grants. In truth we were barely making ends meet, and our students were only paid from one project, our public art program. We wanted to be able to answer this question with an answer that would be helpful in an environment without a philanthropic community. We needed to make making money a higher priority, paying all of our students to perform, and creating jobs within the creative sector a priority.
To that end in 2015 we created a new program called the Creative Core. It is for lack of a better term our effort at creating a creative arts training, contracting and placement program. It is a way for WBL to engage youth artists; adult artists and people who wanted to work in the creative sector but who were not artists themselves. The Creative Core is a program for young aspiring arts managers, and admin staff for creative businesses. This final group is the most important because it would also be a way for us to engage court-involved youth in the District of Columbia in meaningful, poverty escaping, and employment. In Washington DC, the overwhelming majority of court involved youth are Black and male. This effort represents a decided turn in our programming priorities.
