Urging Youths to Step Up To Life's Opportunities

Academy Uses Hip-Hop to Spur Creativity

Although for many youths in the Benning Road area, hip-hop is the soundtrack of their lives, the Urban Arts Academy aims to transcend the familiar beats and rhymes and use hip-hop as a catalyst to change lives.

"Hip-hop is your life," Goldie Deane, the academy's director, tells students. "It's not the only thing in your life, but it's a resource for many things in your life."

Hip-hop as a musical genre is generally defined as vocalization over mixed music and beats. But hip-hop also describes a culture that branches out to include rapping, DJ skills, art, fashion and break dancing. It's a collaborative culture that evolves as new generations add their interpretations to the lifestyle and the music, which is said to have had its roots in the Bronx.

The Urban Arts Academy started four years ago as a Saturday program to give young people in the Benning Park community opportunities to express themselves creatively through hip-hop. As interest grew, the program grew into an after-school and weekend activity, said Mazi Mutafa, executive director of Words, Beats & Life, the organization that sponsors the Urban Arts Academy.

The academy has four sites, with the largest in the Benning Park Recreation Center.

"People live in this same neighborhood for multiple generations," Mutafa said. "One of the common things parents said was that there was nothing like this when they were children. We realized it was a golden opportunity because the parents were so connected to the recreation center."

Along with providing students a safe environment after school and on weekends, instructors focus on teaching "transferable life skills" that can help students with jobs or education, he said.

"Rather than waiting until young people are in trouble, we do what we can to help them understand by giving them opportunities and helping them to think about their futures in ways that are concrete," Mutafa said.

For example, a course called Hustlenomics helps students learn about financial responsibility, independence and entrepreneurship by putting a positive spin on the term "hustle." Students are taught how to manage their finances and use their creativity to "hustle," or make money.

"You can hustle and sell T-shirts," Deane said. "You can hustle and have your own business."

The academy is working on a program that will target older youths and their parents with a focus on cooking and event planning. Mutafa said the participants will help organize a farmers market near the recreation center. Although produce from a farmers market is not considered a touchstone of hip-hop culture, it addresses a community need, which is another part of the academy's mission, Mutafa said.

"The idea is for us not to just be the people bringing resources to the community," he said. "We're empowering entire families to make changes in the community."

In other programs, the academy's 20 instructors guide students in skills such as videography, jewelry making, dance, chess and being a disc jockey, activities that are part of the hip-hop culture and that instructors use to help students grow.

Poetry workshops drive students to put into words what they think and feel and the ways they relate to the world, similar to hip-hop lyrics. Jewelry-making workshops encourage students to see jewelry, whether they are making or wearing it, less as "bling," the flashy jewelry referenced in hip-hop culture, and more about communicating to the world who they are.

"It's important to subtly remind kids that they define hip-hop," Deane said. "They create it. They define it."

A sense of ownership and independence is key to having students learn through hip-hop, Deane said.

Alexis Martin, 11, said that she particularly enjoys chess and that it calms her. But she is also trying her hand at making jewelry and writing poetry.

"You can always find something to rhyme," Alexis said. "You wrote it. You understand it. It's your poetry."

Traditional academics are not ignored. The academy recently launched the College Material campaign to emphasize the importance of continuing formal education. The program includes T-shirts that label students as "college material." Students can receive help with filling out applications and deciding what kind of postsecondary education is best for them, whether it's a four-year college, a community college or a trade school.

"We engage people as young as elementary school and try to get them to start thinking about their futures," Mutafa said.

The Urban Arts Academy requires students and families to submit applications, but its programs are free. The academy is funded mainly through grants and foundations that work to help communities, Mutafa said.

Many students who have taken part in the program for some time are now in college.

More than 150 students are enrolled at the Urban Arts Academy's four sites. Besides the Benning Road site, two are in Northwest Washington and a fourth opened in Northeast in early August.