Moses House awarded grant by Project Ahimsa

On March 16, 2010, the Moses House was awarded a $1,500 mini-grant by Project Ahimsa, a Patel Foundation Cultural Initiative that operates under the auspices of the Patel Foundation for Global Understanding. Project Ahimsa is “a global effort to empower youth through music” by developing and supporting community based music education. It carries out its mission “by producing cultural events, supporting youth music educators throughout the world, developing innovative cultural arts programming, and donating musical instruments” (source: Project Ahimsa website). Ahimsa is a concept that originates in the ancient Indian religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It means “do no harm” and entails pursuing a life of nonviolence.

The Moses House is extremely grateful for Project Ahimsa’s support, and it feels honored to become part of the Project Ahimsa family. The Moses House will use the Project Ahimsa mini-grant to develop its Street Music and Turntables Workshop. The funds will purchase some of the sound equipment necessary to set up a permanent mini-studio in the Moses House building at the Sulphur Springs Cultural Center in the Mann-Wagnon Park in Tampa, Florida. More funds need to be raised to finish building the studio, but the Project Ahimsa grant is a big step forward that will allow the Moses House to take its music education program to a whole other level. Thus far the program has depended on sound equipment loaned from the program’s directors and instructors. The addition of studio equipment to the Moses House’s resource capacity will allow more youth to enroll in the Street Music Workshop, as well as benefit additional youth and community residents with open microphone events, freestyle sessions, live performances, and other related activities.

The Street Music and Turntables Workshop has been one of the Moses House’s most popular programs among Sulphur Springs youth, many of whom find release from the pressures of everyday life in the freestyle rapping sessions scheduled into the workshop. Created in the spring of 2009, the Moses House Street Music and Turntables Workshop provides culturally relevant music education to youth living in situations of risk in order to improve literacy, encourage social activism, and develop positive leadership skills in the local community. The workshop is conducted by DJ Chang Bang, the program director, with assistance from DJ James West and Moses House volunteer instructors. (DJ Chang Bang provided one of the bonus tracks on Project Ahimsa’s Global Lingo CD.) This program provides a supportive educational outlet for underprivileged neighborhood youth to express their musical talents, lyrical creativity, and poetic gifts; constructs a positive social space in which neighborhood youth can critically discuss community issues while enhancing their abilities to artistically represent such issues; and advances the multicultural and social justice education potential of artistic and cultural activities in the neighborhood. As such, the workshop supports Project Ahimsa’s mission to empower youth through developing and supporting community based music education.