ROUND THREE GRANTEES ANNOUNCED!

The following are descriptions of the funded projects in the words of the project leaders.

 

[Our Prayers for the City] Vanessa Adams

The grant will be used to support our six-week workshop during July and August 2009 at the Studio at Colton. For the first three weeks we will focus on skill-building, artistic development, and project planning. We will practice silkscreen and basic printmaking techniques, will help students develop an idea into an image, and will choose final project locations. The last three weeks we will concentrate on production and organization of the final project-printing on fabric, sewing flags together, and installing the strands. Our final meeting will be a celebration at Colton for our students. Our funding, in its entirety will be used to pay for equipment and supplies-fabric, ink, screens, etc. As we received less funding than we applied for we are going to reduce the number of students served from 10 to 8.

 

[Jazz Hip Hop Orchestra] Angelamia Bachemin

The project will be a 4 week music program that will be held in # 309 Jazz Hip Hop Orchestra Studio at the Studio at Colton, 2300 Saint Claude Ave. New Orleans, LA. The students will come from the 5^th , 6^th , 7^th , 8^th and 9^th wards. They will learn basic musicianship, song form, arranging and dance choregraphy. Jazz Hip Hop Orchestra will teach several Jazz Standard tunes, musical styles and beat combinations. We will encourage original non-violent and socially conscience hip hop, spoken word, poems and bounce material. We will create a video project of an original class composition (* please refer to an example of our DVD  Lucy's Bounce 3min.). The students in a short interview on their school bus talk about what Jazz Hip Hop Orchestra means to them and why it is important. In their own words they feel "New Orleans is really hard. We don't have many opportunities in New Orleans and this is an opportunity for us to express ourselves, and have fun and let go of anger.

Jazz Hip Hop Orchestra is creating a platform for youth to be creative and vocal within their communities. Many youth in New Orleans feel anger in the aftermath of Katrina, their homes and communities are still devastated, family life is a struggle as many people are living with extended family as they repair the damage of their own homes. The anger the youth feel needs to be addressed in order for the recovery of New Orleans to be successful.

 

Recycled Glass Arts & Jewelry [Yasmin Bowers]

"Glass Recycling and Arts Program" responds to the overwhelming amount of  wasted glass (i.e. beer bottles) , and the recent termination of glass recycling in the City of New Orleans. We transform glass that would otherwise go to landfills, into unique and environmentally friendly jewelry, tiles, and mosaic art. We are making an effort to do something about glass waste by creating beautiful arts, and hope to train rising art students on this green job opportunity. Our goal is to fill a gap in the recovery process by limiting wasted glass while creating an educational arts and social enterprise. 

Accomplishments: monthly tabling at Sankofa Marketplace in the Lower 9th Ward to collect glass; collected 500 bottles during 4 pilot collections; designed 5 pieces of recycled glass-based jewelry

 

Mardi Gras Indian History and Bead Sewing [Ed Buckner]

To Jermaine Bossier, the new Chief of the 7^th Ward Creole Hunters, "Masking Indian is a savior." The Porch will create a cross-generational forum to honor 7th Ward Mardi Gras Indian tradition. Chief Pie, Chief Jermaine and Keelian Boyd will teach Indian history and the intricate art of bead sewing to 7th Ward youth. The workshop will connect the neighborhood's oral tradition with the Porch's initiatives for increased literacy; participants will share written pieces about Indian history in community drum/story circles. The artistic skill, innovation and collaboration involved in suit making is a tremendous source of pride in the 7th Ward, and those who have nurtured the tradition's evolution feel the history component of the workshop is urgently necessary. Forced displacement, police brutality against Second Lines and Indians, unfairly expensive parade fees, and tourist industry appropriation of black cultural tradition create the sense that New Orleans black culture is under siege. The workshop will be a safe space for youth to explore their relationship with the legacy and future of Mardi Gras Indians. The Porch hopes that by learning and reclaiming Mardi Gras Indian history and artistry, youth will find the tradition, rooted in community and in constant motion, as a source of strength and resistance.  

 

Open Window Project [Ariella Cohen]

The Open Window Project will be a news and culture website created by teams of young people working with experienced media professionals.  There will be photos, soundmaps and audiovisual slideshows on the site. We will be working with young people from diverse backgrounds. Because we are working in a majority African American area and targeting students in the city's public schools, a majority of our trainees will be African-American.With a team that includes African American journalists,  our trainers will reflect the diversity of our students.

Open Windows is, by its nature, however, committed to connecting multiple communities through a shared project. Thus,  we expect to work with young people from all quarters of the city. We will engage participants through reaching out to established programs such as Rethink, Neighborhood Story Project, The Porch, Greater New Orleans Affterschool Partnership and Young Aspirations/Young Artists (YA/YA).

Students will complete six three-hour training sessions held on consecutive Saturdays at various locations around the city. After attending the program's six sessions, students are free to become regular contributors to the site. We will hold one round of the training program or a total of 6 three-hour sessions by the Oct. 31 close of the grant cycle.  The program class will have between 10 and 15 students, at least 60 percent of them minority females. Throughout the six-week program, guest speakers including WWL anchor Lee Zurick, blogger Karen Gadbois, JuneBug Productions videographer Terry Scott, former Times-Picayune editor Jed Horne and award-winning African-American reporter Brentin Mock will present to the students. By the conclusion of the six-week training, students will have worked in a team to report and produce at least one multimedia feature story. The six-week training will conclude with a public screening of the multimedia reportage. Held in a location chosen to reflect the show's content, the event will be a celebration of the young journalists and a time for other community members to hear their stories. We will publicize the website and the event through traditional and social media, and at public events leading up to the final screening.  The site will remain online after the grant cycle is complete.

 

Sign-Up [Rondell Crier]

Today, there is a strong need for creative support in the New Orleans recovery process especially in areas of youth empowerment and community development.  Personally, I have worked the majority of my professional career as a practicing artist, art mentor, and arts administrator in the New Orleans area, and consider empowering young people and community arts as much an art form of mine as I do designing, painting, educating, and sculpting. To further contribute to the recovery process for both local youth and local small businesses, I have developed a project titled "Sign-Up", which is created to bring artistic resources to the New Orleans community and designed specifically for social, self, and community advancement. The overall goal of the project is to support neighborhood recovery by utilizing art to strengthen local businesses and empower young people. Direct goals are to provide visual arts training to local youth participants, create signs for small businesses that are in need, and to provide opportunities for young people to develop a sense of giving as donors within their neighborhood. 

 

The Louisiana Drumline Camp [Terence L. Higgins]

The Louisiana Drumline Camp's principle objective is to educate students and to Rebuild and preserve a long standing drumming tradition in New Orleans by developing discipline and leadership through hands on fun learning of basic fundamentals in rudimental drumming and also to expose the students to contemporary and hybrid rudimental drumming skills which are now a national standard in drumming, By implementing these skills to the drumming students of New Orleans is a win win for the students, the parents and the community. The ldc hosted it's pilot mini drum camp on April 18th 2009, with over 100 students in attendance, the camp was a  huge success, our goal and aspiration is to grow into a full summer program for the youths in our community. The Louisiana Drumline camp is a public event accepting students from the ages of 8 -  18 camp hours are from 9 am - 5 pm.

 

7^th Ward Artist Residency [Maria Hinds]

7^th Ward artists residency is a multidisciplinerary multi-faceted artists residency based in the 7th ward. It is a cross section of where art meets activism answering a need in a community that has long been neglected and fallen foul to expliotative developers and landlords. The residency will invite international visual artists/writers/landscape architects/musicians/film-makers and photographers to work with youth and adult groups in the 7^th ward to identify needs in the community and initiate creative resolutions. In the 7^th ward we have a deep need to inform and equip community members with the means to address and discuss social issues that immediately affect our psyche particularly with regard to disenfranchisement, violence, opportunistic development, education and health and particularly in the wake of Katrina. Artists are required to spend min 6 weeks in the residency and to work directly with local community groups, schools and cultural organisations in order to address the community's needs.

We will work with residents of the 7^th ward which is a struggling but growing community with a long history of    music, artistic and cultural activities. We will invite local and international artists who have a proven track record in working with community groups and whose work investigates social issues. Artists will collaborate with local children, schools and community organisations and businesses to produce meaningful and engaging works.

 

 

Documentary Film with the Iberville Boys and Girls Club [Lily Keber]

In the summer of 2009, New Orleans VideoVoices will partner with the Iberville Boys and Girls Club to teach 10-15 of their youth documentary filmmaking techniques and assist them in creating a film on what issues are important to the Iberville community. Through community interviews and ongoing discussion, the youth producers will investigate what community strengths and concerns exist and what solutions are possible. At the end of the program, we will host a public screening and community discussion, encouraging parents, professionals, young people and policy makers to come together to discuss issues presented in the film and to mobilize for action.

We believe that documentary film offers a unique opportunity to engage the creative power of community and amplify the voices of a largely unheard population. By partnering with the Boys and Girls Club, we aim to encourage critical thinking and media literacy skills, and to bridge the technology gap often found between inner-city youth and their suburban counterparts. In an era known for increased youth violence and decreased levels of opportunity, we envision this project as an important vehicle of empowerment, creative stimulation and self-expression.

 

Stretching Sky Arts Laboratory [Hao-Peng Liao]
The project will take on an intensive workshop format, over 6-8 sessions of 3 hour lessons starting in the second half of June.  The final performance will correspond with a mid-July fund-raising event.  Due to the increasing interests of musicians and sculptors, an influx of instructing adult artists will work to the project's advantage.  The project scope shifts from explorations in three instrument types to one string and one wind based application.

Due to the facilities concerns of Studio at Colton this workshop series will be open to students until enrollment is filled at 10 students.  All proceedings of the project will still take place at the AMACO/Brent Ceramics Laboratory at Studio at Colton, with lessons in studio 101 for clay instruction, studio 113 for glazing and critique, and the kiln room for firing.  Additionally, music lessons will be jointly held in Peter Spring's instrument repair shop and Charmaine Neville's music classroom, and a larger open space such as one of the galleries for the final performance.

The string instrument of interest is the "berimbau" of African origins but is played widely in Brazil.  It has few components and a simplistic construction; it also has wide latitude for modification, which correlates well with the underlying approach of this project.  The wind instrument will be a flute-based exploration, mainly of a tube construct.  Peter's expertise is in transverse-styled flute (to the side); however, we will add sound chambers and experiment with sound-hole locations and sizes.  Keep in mind that while ultimately the final products will produce sounds, the precision of these instruments will be an approximation of their traditional forms.

 

What My Neighborhood Means to Me [Ariya Martin]

New Orleans Kid Camera Project will facilitate a group of youth in a series of workshops designed to explore 'What my neighborhood means to me. Participants will work together to design a public photography installation in their community. Students will learn technical aspects of photography, along with the role and impact that art can have on a community level. As they learn how to become visual storytellers, students will document their impressions of the community, what they feel is important, what makes them proud and what they'd like to change.

Students will take photographs in their neighborhood, engage in image-sharing sessions, and eventually select one photograph each that will be printed as large 7 X 7 feet outdoor vinyl banners to be displayed in the community. The images will be displayed in their community; outside walls of buildings that we will be granted permission to display work on.  These large scale images will serve as a very public recognition of young people's voices, and a compelling glance into their neighborhood as seen through their visions. Such public art exhibitions "create an intimate reminder of who lives inside the houses that outsiders pass everyday" (Wendy Ewald, Literacy Through Photography).

 

WordPlay New Orleans [Valerie McMillan]

WordPlay New Orleans (WPNO) teaches the craft of spoken word poetry (poetry that is written primarily for performance) to teens and provides multiple forums for youth to practice the art form in community with one another. WordCamp is a free, two week boot-camp style poetry project that is sponsored by WordPlay New Orleans.  Registration is open to youth ages 12-21 and there is a maximum of 30 participants.

WordCamp's goals are to: teach youth spoken word fundamentals during daily 90 minute workshops, allow them the opportunity to build their own spoken word community through becoming a part of the New Orleans Youth Slam (NOYS) initiative, provide youth with necessary tools to develop and produce their own "open mics", promote leadership development and encourage team building among participants.

 

Junebug Jabbo Jones: Talkin My Way Back Home [Royce Osborn]

"Junebug Jabbo Jones: Talkin' My Way Back Home," is a community visual memory installation project based on the legacy of Junebug Productions , Inc (JPI.) Junebug Productions creates, produces, tours and presents high-quality performing art which support and encourages oppressed and exploited African Americans in the Black Belt south who are working to improve the quality of life in their communities. JPI, started in 1980, is the organizational successor to the Free Southern Theater (FST,) which was formed in 1963 to be a cultural arm of the Civil Rights Movement-"a theater for those who have no theater." Artistic Director, John O'Neal, was a cofounder of the FST and a guiding force throughout the organization's existence. The title name is taken from the mythic Junebug Jabbo Jones, a character invented by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC), during the ‘60's to represent the wisdom of common people. Through interviews we will create a collective memory from people who have made significant contributions in New Orleans and whose stories will enhance the recovery of African American culture here. The goal of the project is for people to celebrate their own culture and spirit in the city while they reconstruct their lives.

The revised project will use Creative Recovery grant to videotape interviews with John O'Neal and other founding members of Junebug Productions and the Free Southern Theatre to upload onto Junebug's website.  As we receive further funding, we will continue the interviews, add b-roll footage and photos and expand distribution.

 

2110 Royal Stories [Joanna Russo]

More than fifty individuals live in Christopher Homes, an elderly living facility at 2110 Royal St.  The residents suffer from various ailments, and many have difficulty getting around.  Some of them receive assistance from nurses.  Occasionally, a family member may visit.  "The residents are lonely," Deacon Miller tells me.  "They like to talk, but they don't have anyone to talk to."

Starting this August, they will.  With ‘2110 Royal Stories,' theatermaker Joanna Russo will begin a three month storytelling workshop at Christopher Homes.  The goals of the workshop are to promote social interaction, engage the imagination and build confidence and listening skills.  Each session, Joanna will bring ideas and supplies to help the participants tell stories related to a particular theme. At the end of the residency, we will have a celebration for our storytellers, encouraging residents to share their stories with the broader community.

The imagination and memories of the elderly can easily be lost in the quickly-shifting post-Katrina landscape.  If New Orleans rebuilds without the insight of its elders, something precious will be lost.  ‘2110 Royal Stories' seeks their insight through a loving and age-old practice: storytelling, or the passing of wisdom.

 

StoryPod [Emilie Taylor]

The Storypod is a design build project which aims to give the greater new orleans community a sculptural yet functional ammenity - a place to tell stories and find the stories of other locals. I am working with the Tulane City Center to facilitate and encourage the ongoing work of the Neighborhood Story Project through a design/build project. The permanent installation, referred to as the Storypod, is a library with display and storage space, as well as an intimate space for students and locals to exchanging stories.

Our community client/collaborator, the NSP, is located in the 7^th Ward and empowers locals by working to give voice to marginalized communities and their rich history. The NSP now works in a spartan cornerstore which lacks many of the simple elements (such as storage, small discussion spaces, and library shelving) that help make a creative work space more useable and more productive. The City Center has engaged in several community design build projects in the past few years. Projects such as the Hollygrove Growers Pavilion and the House of Dance and Feathers have taken young energetic student designers and challenged them to develop a social conscious, and become better designers through community based projects. The Storypod would be a sculptural gesture which serves as an example of sustainable material use and supports a non-profit engaged in sustaining the culture of New Orleans.

The Storypod/library design will begin in September 2009 with several meetings with the community and our non-profit partner, Neighborhood Story Project. The construction will take place in the fall with a final installation taking place in the month of November. The Storypod will be a permanent functional installation in the NSP space. The final design/build project assesment meeting with the community will take place in January after the stakeholders have had time to use the Storypod.

 

How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress [Tristan Thompson]

Our community-based arts project, "How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide From a Work in Progress," is designed to address the complex nature of New Orleans' reconstruction by bringing together the collective energies and expertise of artists, writers, community activists, and engaged citizens.  It is both a resource and an artistically engaging documentation of the renaissance of community-led initiatives since the storm.

"Field Guide" spotlights the resilience and creativity of individuals and groups from across the city's varied demographics who have filled the civic voids left in the wake of the levee failures: who hand-painted street signs; started or re-opened businesses against all odds; who tend our parks, re-forest our diminished urban canopy, clean our streets, lobby for stronger levees, and organize campaigns to counter crime and violence; artists and cultural institutions whose work helps people stay hopeful and engaged.

The project is a positive reflection of the community's efforts, advocating for the city's continued rebuilding, acting as a resource for those outside of the city and presenting stories that might not otherwise be told. The highly visual nature of the project also helps document the many connections between the recovery efforts and the roles they play in the reconstruction.

 

 

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APPLICATIONS DUE: MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2009

DOWNLOAD APPLICATIONS & GUIDELINES HERE

Creative Recovery Mini-Grant Application_R3.doc
Creative Recovery Mini-Grant Guidelines_R3.doc

The Creative Recovery Mini-Grant Program, administered by Transforma, supports work that exists at the intersection of art, social justice and recovery in New Orleans.  The program fuels the recovery by supporting the vibrant activity that occurs on the ground level.  Awards range from $500 - $2,500 and are intended to provide direct project support for the work of independent artists, collectives, gathering spaces, and publications that contribute to the rebuilding of New Orleans. Projects can include an exhibition, a public art project, the publication of writing, an online project, an artist residency, a screening, and more.

INFORMATION ABOUT PAST ROUNDS:
In the first round, the Rick Lowe, Jessica Cusick and Sam Durant of the National Resource team served as the panelists.  In the second round of mini-grant program, Transforma compiled a five-person panel of locally- and nationally-based individuals specializing in various fields, including housing, community development, education, mental health and art. The voting members of the panel included; Anne Gisleson (writer, educator, co-founder of Antenna Gallery), Leslie E. Lawrence, M.D (Adult Psychiatrist), Rick Lowe (Transforma National Resource Team, Executive Director of Project Row Houses, artist), James Perry (Executive Director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center), and Robert Ruello (Transforma National Resource Team, artist, professor). In both rounds the proposals were assessed based on the stated goals of the Creative Recovery Mini-Grant program as publicized in the guidelines distributed with the application.  The panelists reviewed the proposals individually and then shared their recommendation in a roundtable conversation with the other panelists.  It was through this multi-layered process of individual and group assessment that the grant awards were decided.  Feedback was not offered to those that did not receive grants due to limited internal capacity, however, applicants are welcome to contact the Transforma Program Specialist (jess@transformaprojects.org) for such information. The supported projects are as follows, as defined in the words of the applicants;

ROUND ONE GRANTEES

A=AGHT: This project is creates a semi-utopic virtual space/town whose rules, population and culture are generated by marginalized youth from New Orleans and Tallaght in South Dublin County, Ireland. Adult facilitators and artists from both cities challenge youth to explore historic moments, social grievances, ethnic and racial disparities and encourage them to solve identified concerns through creative projects.

Nine Times Tenth Anniversary Poster Project: Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club will produce three posters with Hot Iron Press for their tenth anniversary parade.  One will detail the history of the club, one will focus on the history of the Desire Housing Development, and the third will focus on the role of Nine Times in the process of rebuilding the upper Ninth Ward.

O.C. Haley Green Market & Community Garden: The Latino Farmers Co-op of Louisiana with other partners is re-building community gardens. Access to education and sustainable agriculture resources are provided so people can grow healthy food in urban ecological farms and community gardens, create entrepreneurship and address social and economic issues. The theme of the mural at the micro-farm on O.C. Haley will reflect peace and harmony with nature, food, community identity and history among people of all colors.

St. Claude Avenue Sankofa Sustainable Marketplace: This market will bring vitality to the neighborhood of the historic Lower 9th ward with an artist celebration. Utilitarian artwork, horticulture arts and music performances by New Orleans music artists will be showcased in this marketplace. This community building initiative supports the neighborhood revitalization of the Lower Ninth Ward and will be a significant catalyst to the community’s economic development.

Street Talk Production Outreach Training Program: Street Talk is the cultural news arm of the community radio station, WWOZ. Street Talk stories offer unique accounts of New Orleans life not covered by mainstream media. Street Talk seeks to foster the storytelling abilities of those New Orleanians who might not otherwise have access to training in radio production.

ROUND TWO GRANTEES

Cornerstones[of the Month]: Cornerstones is a project in collaboration with the Tulane City Center that tells the history and culture of New Orleans through our neighborhood places. Through interviews, written narratives, photographs, maps and architectural drawings, we are documenting the dynamic intersection of places and people that make New Orleans unique.  In the months after Hurricane Katrina, we collaborated with the Neighborhood Story Project to produce the publication Cornerstones: Celebrating the Everyday Monuments and Gathering Places of New Orleans’ Neighborhoods, which showcases seven social and cultural landmarks that helped revive the city after Katrina.   Since the book release, we have sought the input of New Orleanians to expand our collection of cornerstones developed in our publication by collecting nominations of other social and cultural monuments throughout the city and to create an online registry of important local places.  By documenting and advocating for the “unofficial” monuments of our city, the Cornerstones project is a voice in our rebuilding climate for the integral spaces that keep community environments and social networks intact.  The Cornerstones of the Month effort is a way, through creative signage and postcards, to tangibly recognize and call to residents’ attention a selection of overlooked and threatened landmarks from our registry.

Newspaper Theatre and Ethnodrama: In order to become fully capable of contributing to the recovery of New Orleans, young residents must first recognize how they identify their participation in the process.   This project proposes to create a 4-month theater residency for 10-12 upper elementary and middle school students of the Lower 9th Ward during which they will devise a play based on the power of news media to shape perception.  In this residency, participants will analyze positive and negative images of their generation's contribution to recovery in local papers such as The Times Picayune, Gambit, and Tribune, and national media such as The New York Times and Newsweek.  Through the Boal techniques of Image Theatre and Newspaper Theatre, the participants will develop short vignettes based on these images and create alternative scenes.  They will then role-play as journalists, and interview peers and family members regarding their concepts of young New Orleanians and its recovery. In the final months, the participants will compile these interviews into a scripted play in the genre of television and print news. The residency will culminate with two performances of their "living newspaper," initially for their peers and then for the greater New Orleans community.  Couched in the safety of theater and role-play, this project provides a means to motivate action in the youth, provoke insight in the interviewees, and unify the community as collaborative storytellers and audience

New World Wailing Wall: This project is a sculptural installation sited on the vacant slab that once was a family home in the flooded 7th ward Gentilly Terrace neighborhood.  Its goals are threefold:  to mark yet another empty spot to which a family has yet to return; to reanimate the partially repopulated community by providing an artistic and social focal point; and to help the community attract attention to its continuing struggle to recover.  Made of 12' tall plaster reinforcement panels scavenged from Katrina piles as a base, the sculpture incorporates hundreds of clear plastic strands which both reflect sunlight by day and are illuminated by fiberoptics at night to reference volumes of water.  The piece is freestanding and viewed from both streets of the corner.  The supportive steel armature is hidden from sight behind the "wall." While some homes in the immediate area are occupied and one across the street is currently being built, this is a neighborhood which is struggling to come back with little to no help from insurance companies or the government.  The neighborhood association enthusiastically supports the project as a means to draw attention to this forgotten corner of New Orleans, and AORTA (formerly ARTinACTION) is sponsoring the site as one of the locations on its tour for visitors to Prospect.1 until January 2009.  Most post-Katrina attention has been focused on the 9th ward and Lakeview, but Gentilly was also decimated by flooding and needs to have its plight known.

Puppet Arts at Colton School: We are New Orleans based performers with a passion for local culture and youth education. We have just been granted studio space and theatre access at the Colton Academy on St Claude Ave. in which to pursue our projects. Through “Young Audiences” we are developing a series of performance-oriented workshops that will foster collaboration between ourselves as puppeteers and storytellers and the youth of our community. Participants will be guided through and encouraged in developing their own unique puppets and invited to contribute a piece of their personal biography to a larger narrative. We will reinvent found objects and recycled garbage and put these into conversation with our bodies to create our new heroes and their world. This work offers a unique opportunity for a dialogue to occur between cultural perspectives in a format that transcends the limits of language.  The goal of this physical and musical work is to find an escape for a ‘common language’  from the limitations of words, to generate a playful vocabulary through which the narratives of the overlooked, the unheard and the emerging identities of a youth audience can find their voice. Cultural curiosity and exploration between communities is at the heart of our experimentation with narrative development. We hope to leave our participants with a broader communication base, fresh skills and new concepts for ‘speaking’ and a heightened sense of the significance of their personal mythologies.

Streetcar Serenade: This project is a boundary-breaking gathering in a public space meant to turn strangers into friends and public service into community celebration.  12 of New Orleans' finest spoken word artists will perform their works on the St Charles line, both at the stops and aboard the streetcar, accompanied by local musicians.  The event will conclude with a reading and concert at The Maple Leaf Bar where we will honor the long, dedicated service of one of our finest poets: Nancy Harris.   Nancy has been running the Maple LEAF Poetry series, the longest standing poetry reading in the South, for over 20 years. New Orleans has a lot of issues that need attention.  While the business sector and municipal government are busy with encouraging tourism and infrastructure projects, we believe that our greatest strength comes from our people.  We hope that this highly visual event will encourage youth in their literary pursuits, and that the power of the poetic voice can bring change to an issue seriously affecting our impoverished working class: public transportation. In these times of economic turmoil and energy crisis New Orleans should be planning innovative strategies to reduce fuel usage and improve the baseline quality of life for our citizens as part of our Recovery struggle.  We  believe that we have an opportunity to be an international leader amongst cities looking to live in greater harmony with their environments and with the culture of their citizens.