And that’s just what I did today! Last week was a really big week at the All Stars– I had a $500 donation on the streets (which is huge!!) and my team sponsored 31 kids to participate in our programs for the upcoming school year. This week we are trying to keep that momentum and continue to meet new people and tell them what our organization is doing. We set up camp at the corner of 23rd and Broadway (right in Madison Square Park) and had a two-hour shift of making friends and supporting our programs. I was pretty low on energy because I had failed to go to Trader Joe’s and get myself the sustenance necessary for street performance, but my team did well and we headed back to 42nd in good spirits. After we debriefed and had a quick lunch, all of the GOAL interns booked it to Penn Station to get on the train to Newark, New Jersey, where we went to see the expansion efforts of the All Stars Project. It was there that I learned that Newark was not just a town with an airport that Southwest Airlines flies to.
We arrived at the fifth floor of a seemingly central, downtown building after walking through some seedy-looking streets to get there. The New Jersey fundraising coordinator and director of programming met us when we walked into a three or four-room office that couldn’t have looked less like our 30,000 square foot center in the middle of Manhattan. It was packed with kids filling out paperwork and laughing, and people squeezing through doorways to get to different sections of the office. We sat down in a conference room area and listened to the two higher-ups speak about Newark’s history and why the All Stars Project expansion effort is so necessary. I have been doing a lot of research about after school programs in New Jersey, so I knew that there was great need for this, but I had no idea that Newark is so poor or that its population is so predominantly made up of people of color. Hearing about the corporate involvement in the project and watching a video featuring All Stars kids’ experiences in Newark was amazing, but the most incredible part was that the All Stars programs are being tailored to fit the Newark community. They aren’t trying to just put New York programs into place, they are finding ways to fit them into Newark’s history and present context. The Development School for Youth program already exists there, as does the Talent Show Network. It will be interesting to see what else they come up with!
After our meeting, I headed back to Penn Station and then back to the All Stars Project center for my first installment of UX. UX is the organization’s educational initiative that is aimed at promoting cultural literacy in people of all ages. The All Stars Project’s focus is on development, and they believe that is something that shouldn’t be limited to youth. UX offers free workshops and classes that are interesting and enriching, so I signed up! Tonight’s talk was by an educator in Brazil, Fernanda Liberali, who has used a performance-based model similar to the All Stars’ in order to help reform the very broken Brazilian education system. She and her team go into public schools and teach English by creating stories, songs, and plays with the children. It is very effective and it was great to hear someone from another hemisphere talking about things that are so relevant to what’s happening now with education in the U.S. She spoke of a lack of creativity in classrooms and limits put on teachers, which I believe to be an issue in our country as well. It was so interesting– I’m so glad I went. Today was a big day, but tomorrow we get to work with the summer “semester” of Youth Onstage! theater program. I can’t wait to meet more of the kids and see what our fundraising efforts are doing to impact them.
…and I took a picture to add to this today but I can’t figure out how to upload it…I’ll figure it out soon!
