Africanhiphop.com
A Web site about rappers from the African continent.

AfroReggae
Cultural group (break-dance, capoeira, circus and 11-piece band) established in the favela (shantytown) of Vigário Geral, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1993. They aim "to take young people out of the drug trade through arts-based activities," working in the poorest, most violent communities in Rio. Insight programme: community-based mixed-arts workshops, debates and trainings.

After-school Arts Enrichment
Resource brief on performing arts program at Community Education Resource Center (CERC) at M.S. 67 Queens, N.Y., as example of effective after-school arts enrichment. Reviews consistent participation, inclusiveness, opportunities for student input, leadership, support within the school community, staff teamwork and curriculum. Written by Policy Studies Associates, Inc.; published by The After-School Corporation (TASC), 2001.

All-ages Movement Project
Network of community-based organizations that connect young people through independent music and art. Based in San Francisco, Calif.; founded by Shannon Stewart.

American Music Conference
Educational association founded in 1947 to promote the importance of music, music-making and music education. Site has history, music & the brain, philanthropy, Best 100 Communities for Music Education.

Amplifier
Three-year program in Suffolk, England: series of public workshops and events to teach young musicians all aspects of modern music. Includes community music.

Andante.com
Educational site dedicated to classical music. Searchable calendar of current performances worldwide; magazine with news, reviews, interviews, commentary; academic journal; reference database; profiles; directories.

Arts & Spirituality Center
Nonsectarian organization in Philadelphia, Pa., founded by a group of artists and spiritual leaders to focus on social and personal healing through interplay of artistic and spiritual expression. Arts After School program, MasterPeace program, Interfaith Youth Poetry Project, Drums for Peace music program and Teens United Performing Arts Project. Has worked with private, charter and public schools, after-school programs, serving primarily low-income, “at-risk” youth. Founded 2000.

Arts Share
Community arts program of the University of Iowa's Division of Performing Arts, School of Art and Art History and Writers' Workshop. Interactive performances, workshops, readings, residencies and master classes statewide by faculty artists and graduate students. School programs, Arts Share Summer Camp, Patient Voice Project offering creative writing classes to chronically ill hospital patients.

Arts in Prison, Inc.
Volunteer-run, Kansas-based prison arts program that began with East Hill Singers, a joint inmate-volunteer choir, in 1996. Now offers prison arts classes including African-American History, visual arts, drama, creative writing, plus yoga, horticulture therapy, public speaking, more. Founded by Elvera Voth "and her dream to teach inmates to sing."

Axis of Justice
Nonprofit organization formed by artists Tom Morello of Audioslave and Serj Tankian of System of a Down. Its purpose is to bring together musicians, fans of music,and grassroots political organizations to fight for social justice.

Black August Hip Hop Project
International cultural-activist exchange founded by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Stress Magazine, and Students for Jericho. Develops and implements International Human Rights Campaign using Hip Hop as a tool and common language. International network of hip-hop artists and activists in three countries. Hip Hop Activism workshops, exchanges between international communities, annual events, DVD and mix tape, benefits for political prisoners. Named after organization established in California prison system in early 1970s by men and women of the Black Liberation Movement.

Brooklyn College Art Lab
Arts and technology after-school site in Brooklyn, N.Y., serving some 700 students a year from some 30 high schools, averaging 80-100 students per day. Central node for The Arts Network at Brooklyn College Community Partnership, a creative learning network linking the college to the communities of Brooklyn; programs in seven Brooklyn high schools.

Buddy Holly Center
Community art center in Lubbock, Texas, that memorializes musician Buddy Holly and other performing artists and musicians of West Texas. Exhibitions, annual music symposium.. Annual Extensive community programs, including education, hospital and high-school training programs.

Cathedral Choir School of Delaware
Music education program for economically disadvantaged youth 7-18 at the The Cathedral Church of Saint John Episcopal Cathedral in Wilmington, Del. Performed in some of the world’s most renowned cathedrals, serves as a prototype for church choral-education programs.

Center for Political Song
Online collection of political songs; based in Scotland.

Chicago Children's Choir
Educational group with school, neighborhood and concert choirs

Children Helping Children
Musical charity organization based in New York, supporting pediatric wards of area hospitals and national medical organizations through in-hospital concerts and gala fundraising events. Founded by concert violinist Jourdan Urbach when he was seven years old.

Children's Peace Theatre
Helps youth explore notions of peace and conflict through the performing arts. Monthly Stone Soup Community Gatherings, conflict-evolution workshops, Sounds Like Peace (music), Art for Change (visual art), Performers for Peace. Directed by founder Robert Morgan in Toronto, Ont., Canada.

Choir Works
Free sacred choral music for church choirs. Anthems, hymn arrangements and hymns in .pdfs for download and print. Free MP3 practice accompaniment for most titles.

Choral Earth
Organization that partners choral music and civic engagement for social change and healing. Consultations on "greening your chorus." Choral Earth circle membership program with benefits. Sing Your Part online initiative. Founded in 2000 at Singing Farm in Central Virginia by Rachel Bagby.

Clabber, Coal & Ceilidh
Project at Scottish Mining Museum in Newtongrange, May 2006; 170 primary-school children and support staff from four primary schools attended workshops looking at mining life through dance, poetry and drama, song and percussion. Site includes feedback from students, teachers.

Coming to America: Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant Voices
Music and civic-dialogue project of American Composers Orchestra, exploring evolution of American music through work of immigrant composers

Community Music
British site devoted to the precept "that everyone should have the chance to make music of one kind or another and that it should be done in an active not passive situation"; founded by Vicky White.

Community MusicWorks
Providence, R.I.-based home of the Providence String Quartet with free after-school education and performance programs that "build meaningful long-term relationships between professional musicians, children and families in the West End and South Side neighborhoods of the city. Instrument lessons with free instruments, musical workshops, performance parties, youth salons, family concert trips, "Phase II" teen program, fellowship program and seminars. Concerts feature work by local composers. Founded 1997 by Sebastian Ruth with start-up funding from Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University.

Continental Harmony Project
Millennium Project of American Composers Forum. First nationwide music-commissioning program in American history: new compositions in communities in all 50 states.

Continental Harmony: A Study in Community-based Arts
Results of a study using a new method to evaluate a Millennium Project that matched composers with communities in every state. By Patricia Shifferd and William Cleveland (American Composers Forum, 2001; also published on CAN, 2001).

Cooperative Artists Institute
Massachusetts organization offering Tribal Rhythms community-building technique.

Critical Breakdown
Hip-hop activist program committed to engaging young people in social change. Based in Boston, Mass., and supported by American Friends Service Committee. Monthly open mics, conferences, participation in rallies, protests and marches

Dance Mission Theater
San Francisco-based organization including Dance Brigade, a six-member professional women's socio-political, dance-theater and drumming company; annual events showcasing emerging and established Bay Area choreographers; instructional dance program serving adults and youth; 140-seat Dance Mission Theater; rentals. Includes GRRRL Brigade, a dance, theater and taiko drumming company for girls ages 13 and up; and Junior GRRRL Brigade for ages 9-12; both perform regularly in Bay Area for school assemblies, demonstrations, conferences. Also GRRRLs Dance Camp, summers.

Education Through Music
Promote integration of music into curricula of disadvantaged schools to enhance academic performance and general development. Forms long-term partnerships with New York City elementary schools that lack the resources to develop school-wide music programs; ensures high-quality instruction by hiring qualified teaching artists, providing ongoing training, and performing regular program assessments.

Education Through Music -- Los Angeles
Promotes and supports music instruction in disadvantaged schools to enhance academic performance and general development. Founded in 2006, first affiliate music education program based on the ETM® model in New York City.

Fête de la Musique
World Music Day, began in France, 1982. Takes place worldwide on June 21, usually the summer solstice. Amateur and professional musicians encouraged to perform in the streets. conceived by French Music and Dance director Maurice Fleuret for Minister of Culture Jack Lang.

Great Leap
Performing-arts organization dedicated to principles of deepening race relations and promoting harmony between diverse cultural groups. School, youth programs. Rooted in Asian-American community of Los Angeles, Calif. Directed by Nobuko Miyamoto.

Haja Center
A.k.a. the Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture; South Korean organization partnered with Yonsei University; five "factories" for youth work on film and video, the web, pop music, design in life and civil culture. Founded by Cho Haejoang.

Hip-Hop Caucus Institute
Nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that "strengthens social movements with independent research, visionary thinking, and links to the grassroots, the hip-hop community, scholars and elected officials." Programs promote social and political equality in the areas of economics, education, healthcare, housing, and justice: Gulf Coast Renewal Campaign, Hip Hop Helping the Homeless, Southern Progressive Leadership Conference, Shirley Chisolm/Ossie Davis Leadership Institute, Cities For Progress. A Cross-Sector Resource.

In The Sun Foundation
Established by musician Michael Stipe to aid Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Intergenerational Orchestras
Conductor Lorraine Marks has founded two intergenerational orchestras, the New Jersey Intergenerational Orchestra (njio.org) and the Florida Intergenerational Orchestra of America (flioa.org). They include musicians ages 5 to 93 and they perform throughout their respective states in schools, senior-citizen centers, nursing homes and on concert stages.

Iowa Roots
Music, stories and talk with Iowa traditional artists. By Iowa Arts Council and Iowa State University Radio Group.

John Michael Kohler Arts Center
A 100,000-square-foot visual and performing-arts complex devoted to innovative explorations in contemporary art; new models for community arts; educational partnering with an emphasis on early-childhood education; presenting performing artists; supporting practicing artists through residencies and fellowships. Complex includes ten galleries, theater, interdisciplinary performance space, studio-classrooms, meeting spaces, gift shop and café. Community Arts Department, a programming department at the Arts Center has five programs: Connecting Communities, The ARTery, the Community Gallery, the Partnership Program and Community Events.

Keys To The Studio
Music program in Toronto, Ont., Canada, designed specifically for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Gives emerging musicians the opportunity to collaborate with professional musicians in one-to-one sessions, rehearsals with bands made up of peers, workshops, recordings, public jam sessions and concert performances.

Labor Heritage/Rockin' Solidarity Chorus
Chorus of union workers, students, others dedicated to "building more democracy and representation within our unions" and celebration of workers' culture. Based in San Francisco Bay Area, directed by labor organizer Pat Wynne.

Lokkala's Sabrang
Folk-art music and dance group based in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. Lokkala's Sabrang ("wanderer") is "a musical caravan throughout the Thar Desert." Cultural events, seminars, workshops, conferences, cultural tourism. Directed by Karun Goyal.

Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center
Cultural organization in San Pablo, Calif. (San Francisco East Bay Area) training youth in traditional arts. School for the Arts, community events, cultural exchange, mentorship, touring group, community recording studio.

Louis Armstrong Center for Music & Medicine
Music Therapy Department at Beth Israel Medical Center providing services at Music & Health Clinic, in many hospital departments, other clinics and community schools. Programs: Music for AIR (Advances in Respiration); Music for CAIR (Cardiac Advances in Rehabilitation); Asthma Initiative Program; Heather on Earth Multi-site NICU Study on music-therapy interventions for premature infants. Publications, training, education, events and symposia.

M.I.K.E.
Traveling recording studio/performance stage created in 2006 by artists Richard Saxton of the municipalWORKSHOP and Stuart Hyatt of TEAM Records with 100 community participants in Sheboygan, Wisc. Created from a grain bin and salvaged camper and truck parts; available for travel on flatbed semitruck trailer to communities throughout the U.S. Focal point of a 2006 Connecting Communities residency at John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

Medina Collective
Hip-hop/urban culture/journalism/mentorship program for young women of colour ages 16-24. Magazine with contributions from program participants. Founded by Tonika Morgan, based in Tornto, Ont., Canada.

Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE)
Nonprofit, minority rural-development organization created by community leaders in 1967 to stimulate physical, social and economic development in rural Mississippi Delta. Cultural Arts Program with annual Delta Blues Festival, writing competition, Blues in Schools, film festival, international tour, internships. Also housing program and Women's Business Center. Based in Greenville, Miss.

Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation
Supports music education donation and repair of musical instruments to under-served schools, community music programs and individual students nationwide.

MuST (Music in Schools Today)
San Francisco Bay area organizations that supports, develops and promotes music education for youth in schools and in the community. Programs: Achieveing Through Music (music intervention for at-risk youth); Understanding Cultures (classes that improve literacy and social studies through understanding world music); Music Mentors (in person and online); Professional Development (credit through S.F. state U.); Adopt an Instrument; advocacy and free consulting; school and fiscal sponsorship ("start-ups" in music and arts education); special events. Founded 1983.

Music Theatre Workshop
Youth-arts development organization teaches disadvantaged young people writing, producing, and performing original musical theater inspired by personal stories. Works in schools, parks and juvenile prisons in metro Chicago area. Programs: Teens Together; Fabulous Females (for young women incarcerated at Illinois Youth Center at Warrenville); Temporary LockDown (storytelling, movement, drumming workshops for young men/women students at Nancy B. Jefferson Alternative School, Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. Founded 1984 by Meade Palidofsky.

Music for All Seasons
Facilitates the performance of live musical events for confined audiences in children's hospitals, retirement facilities, juvenile detention centers, nursing homes, medical centers, halfway houses and prisons to help aid physical, mental and spiritual healing process. Programs in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and California. Founded 1991 by Rena Fruchter and Brian Dallow.

Music for Change
British organization interested in the intrinsic value of music and how it can play a vital role in community development, social inclusion and antiracist work through education, cooperation and building self-esteem.

NEA Jazz in the Schools
Web-based curriculum and DVD toolkit that explores jazz as an indigenous American art form and means to understand American history. By National Endowment for the Arts.

National Association for Music Education (MENC)
Promoting music education in U.S. schools.

NiteStar Program
Drama, music and peer-education for pre-adolescents, adolescents and young adults living with HIV/AIDS. Includes direct service, training and technical assistance. Productions created by members of the company, with followup workshops, heighten awareness, provide accurate information and help to reduce risky behaviors. Founded by Dr. Cydelle Berlin in 1987. Located at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center, New York City, N.Y.

Old Town School of Folk Music
Teaches and celebrates music and cultural expressions rooted in traditions of diverse American and global communities. Based in Chicago, Ill.; founded 1957 by Win Stracke, Frank Hamilton and Dawn Greening. Classes, concerts, field trips, festivals, music store, resource center, gallery.

Opera House Arts
Community arts space at Stonington Opera House in historic building in Deer Isle, Maine. Performances, new works based in local oral histories, community playreading series, documentaries on local culture and practices, family theater-arts series, local site-specific projects. Carol Estey, Judith Jerome, co-artistic directors. Founded by Linda Pattie.

Pangeiart
Transnational nonprofit association producing cultural-exchange projects focused on creative processes in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

People's Music School
Professionally staffed free community music school in a Chicago neighborhood.

Rock and Shop Market
Independent community market supporting and celebrating indie professional designers, artists and musicians in North Carolina. Annual traveling event founded by artist Michelle Smith.

Settlement Music School
"Largest community-based school of the arts in America," founded 1908 as a social-services center for newly arrived immigrants. Serves 15,000 children and adults in Greater Philsdelphia, 40% on scholarship or financial aid. Individual and group classes in music and related arts. Ensemble Program, Therapeutic Arts Program, award-winning Kaleidoscope Preschool, Teacher Training Institute for the Arts, concerts, summer institutes. Einstein played there weekly.

Sound Sense
U.K. development agency for community music. It promotes significance and value of community music; assists the professional development of people practising and participating in it.

Spare Tyre Theatre Company
London-based company making musical theater from personal stories with women fleeing domestic violence, elders and young people with and without learning disabilities, experiencing homelessness and who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual.

Still Waters Youth Sinfo-Nia of Metropolitan Atlanta
African-American youth orchestra giving "talented, young instrumentalists an opportunity to perform a variety of multicultural music, become more proficient musicians (in an environment where there are no auditions), travel, meet other young musicians, prepare to earn college music scholarships, and, perhaps, consider careers in symphony orchestras and/or music education." Founded as William Grant Still Memorial Youth Orchestra of Metropolitan Atlanta in 1990.

Sweet Honey in the Rock
Grammy Award-winning African-American female a cappella ensemble with musical roots in sacred music of the black church; music speaks out against oppression and exploitation.

Third Street Music School Settlement
"The nation's oldest community music school, founded in 1894 by Emilie Wagner, who believed that music could offer the impoverished immigrants of New York's Lower East Side some respite from their daily struggles." Serves 3,500 students/yr at School and public schools. Tuition assistance, scholarships and program subsidies benefits three-quarters of students. Weekly after-school and Saturday music instruction, theory, composition, ensemble and performance. Classes in ballet, tap dance and Flamenco. Workshops in drawing, painting, collage and ceramics. Preschool arts activities, licensed nursery program. Free, public concerts and recitals by students, faculty, guest artists.

Time & Space Limited
Hudson Valley, N.Y. arts organization with programs in all disciplines dedicated to community and activism. Youth projects and Time To Talk discussion series on local political, social and environmental topics that reflect regional and national concerns. Founded 1991 by N.Y. theater artists Linda Mussmann and Claudia Bruce.

Toy Symphony
Music performance/education project by Tod Machover and MIT Media Lab; exploration of new technological "Music Toys" played by gesture and touch, and software that turns lines into musical compositions. Residencies, workshops, performances.

VH1 Save the Music Foundation
Nonprofit initiative to restore music education programs in U.S. public schools, raise awareness of positive impact music participation has on students.

Why the Arts Matter in Education: or Just What Do Children Learn When They Create an Opera?
Study of school-based elementary opera program. Found that students in the opera setting participate more substantively in group interactions than students in alternative settings. This collaborative work leads to more effective problem solving. Uses both qualitative and quantitative data. By Dennie Palmer Wolf (In Champions of Change, the Arts Education Partnership and the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, 1999).

Youth Ensemble of Atlanta
Georgia-based African-American youth theater company. Original issue-based musical dramas, professional training, internships, record company, international exchange, scholarships, Youth Empowerment Summer. Founded 1990 by Freddie Hendricks.

Youth Music
U.K.-based organization providing music-making opportunities for young people in all regions of the country, esp. those in social and economic need. Workshops, access, partnerships, instruments programs.

Youth Under Construction
Collection of students, teachers and musicians with positive vision of Hip Hop music. Music production, school programs, community collaborations. Founded 1992 by Harmony Garden Entertainment, Royal Oak, Mich. Listen to music online, read lyrics.