May 14, 2020

20,000 Kids Have Learned Hip-Hop From One Revolutionary Network. Today’s Plague Won’t Stop It Either.

Students create hip-hop projects rooted in knowledge of Oakland public parks and climate change as part of Agents of Change youth artist residency program, funded by the California Arts Council. (Pictured pre-pandemic.)Sarah Arnold Photography/Hip Hop for Change

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

Turning a pandemic into an opportunity for educational and artistic empowerment is what Khafre Jay lives for, and his celebrated Hip Hop for Change network isn’t about to let today’s crisis (just the latest) short-circuit its mission. Before this pandemic, his grassroots group worked in schools and on the ground, teaching more than 20,000 kids the hopeful messages and inspiring beats of hip-hop as a human rights movement.

Jay is finding fresh ways to adapt: hosting a weekly Zoom for kids and teachers, sharing grant applications with unemployed artists, producing homemade hip-hop videos, and keeping people alive—HipHopForChange.org has a directory of resources for kids to find food, rent, utilities, and health care. “We’re always thinking of how to take care of our staff, our people, our folks,” he tells me, including an emergency fundraiser for artist-educators who’ve lost their jobs. 

His group just scored two grants from the California Arts Council, one to provide free programming to all public libraries in Oakland and the other for an environmental justice summit. “We’re bringing environmental and hip-hop people together who don’t normally get to rock out. It’s amazing to think that we’ve taught more than 22,000 kids. When you create hip-hop curriculum, kids are gonna ask you for it! These kids are starving for any kind of culturally relevant pedagogy. They want enrichment.”

Hip Hop for Change also hosts women’s empowerment summits, after-school classes, and mentor workshops. “We’re investing in a nonviolent movement of resilience. I want to get people trained up like Medgar Evers trained up his folks, to expand where kids don’t have stable access to hip-hop expression, to further babies knowing they’re beautiful.”

Let Jay know you hear him, check out HipHopForChange.org, and let me know how you think hip-hop can rally kids today at recharge@motherjones.com.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate