This past December, we celebrated the 2020 class of Doing Good! Doing Good is a 30-session intensive after-school entrepreneurial program that provides guidance to high school musicians who want to positively impact their communities. The unique curriculum challenges students to view their curiosity about the world as a window through which they can see the needs, gaps, and opportunities they are best equipped to address. Throughout the semester, students ideate, plan, and implement a community serve project under the guidance of Project 440 staff and teaching artists.
On graduation night, students presented their community service projects to the Project 440 family. Check our this year’s projects, as well as their founding members and mission statements, below. This has been a unique and challenging year for us all. We are so proud of the resilience and strength of each member of this graduating class!
String for Change
Nicolette Sullivan-Cozza, Justine Sullivan-Colla
Mission: SFC’s mission is to give lower income school students access to a music education by providing free music lessons and access to musical instruments.
Tonic K-5
Yeshua Irizarry, Trifena Tanisya, Ronnell Williams, Haley Joyner
Mission: K-5 students deserve to explore music through a cleaner lens. Tonic K-5 will do just that. We will hold meetings once a week with elementary students around the Philadelphia School District. In these meetings, we hope to spark a great interest in the music that these kids will soon be playing. We want the students to look at a piece and be able to understand what they’re playing and how they’re going to be playing it.
Arts for Adolescents
Arianna Baxley, Grace Hiu, Hajra Khan, Leandra Profitt, Mora-Lee Moore, Patrick Cannon, Jada Smith
Mission: Our goal is to give introductions to different forms of art (such as music, art, etc.) and show how they can be used as coping mechanisms for students who are in low-income schools in order to help the lack of mental health resources that are provided.
Art-Shark
Isaiah Muhammad, Kyle Boone, Patricia Harden, Ryan Williams, Tyler Davis, Xandro Xu
Mission: A place for independent artists to share their work and build off of each other.
Black Youth Empowered
Cierra Wright, Divine Epps, Jayla Jones, Leilani Padilla, Yohanna Heyer
Mission: Black Youth Empowered’s mission is to bring awareness around racial injustice and the lack of inclusivity that Black youth face. Over the past couple years the conversation around Black Lives Matter has consistently not reached certain groups, or has quickly lost its speed. We want to focus on engaging and educating nonblack youth and empowering Black youth through social media. We also want to use our connections within the classical music community to reach a generally older and more conservative group through music performance.