Musician Corps teaching artist Eduardo Mendonca at Delridge Community Center. Photo by Marcie Sillman.

Musician Corps

Marcie Sillman
05/06/2010

National service was a major theme of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. He extended his call to community involvement to artists. Candidate Obama proposed to create an Artists' Corps, a domestic Peace Corps for artists. For the past eight months, a Seattle nonprofit has been part of a national project designed to turn the President's proposal into reality.

TRANSCRIPT

When school's over, most kids just want to relax, or play outside. So, on this unseasonably warm Monday afternoon, it's something of a minor miracle to find eight kids inside a room at the Delridge Community Center.

The kids form a semicircle around veteran Brazilian musician Eduardo Mendonca. Together, they clap out a syncopated rhythm pattern.

The kids seem pretty involved, but Mendonca says some days are better than others when it comes to attention and participation.

Mendonca: "Sometimes it's different, sometimes there are challenging behaviors."

For more than 30 years Eduardo Mendonca has split his time between teaching and performing. This year, he's working full time with kids like these, part of a program called Musician Corps.

Whitford: "Musician Corps is a national pilot program at the moment to bring artists, musicians specifically, into full–time service."

Elizabeth Whitford spearheaded Seattle's participation in this national project.

Whitford: "We're trying to develop a domestic Peace Corps for artists. It's sort of taking the talent of musicians to teach music, but to use music as an avenue for civic engagement, community building, connections across culture, race and so on."

Whitford directs an organization called Arts Corps. For 10 years her group has placed working artists in after–school programs around the city Whitford says Arts Corps and the pilot Musician Corps aren't expecting to create a new generation of artists. They believe arts education can help kids develop a raft of life skills, like creative problem solving and critical thinking.

Whitford: "There are good studies out there to show that dropouts decrease, kids are more engaged in learning, that these kinds of learning skills become habits that they carry on and are able to transfer into other aspects of their life."

Musician Corps was inspired by President Obama's call for a national cadre of artists to get involved in community service, like The Works Progress Administration and other programs established during the Great Depression. Congress endorsed the idea when it passed the Kennedy National Service Act last spring, but it didn't provide any money. So Seattle's Arts Corps, and the three other pilot sites around the country, had to raise their own funds. Arts Corps then hired Eduardo Mendonca and three other Seattle musicians to work full time for one year.

Mendonca: "We are public servants. You are serving through the music."

Mendonca was placed with the City of Seattle's Parks Department. He helps coordinate Seattle Center's Festal cultural programs, and brings music classes to five neighborhood community centers, including Delridge.

The program's national administrators will study and assess its effectiveness in Seattle and the other participating cities: Chicago, San Francisco and New Orleans. They hope to show Congress that an Artist Corps deserves a fully funded place along with such service programs as Teach for America and the Peace Corps. But Elizabeth Whitford says even without the final study results, the Musicians Corp participants believe the project is successful.

Whitford: "We've gone ahead and applied jointly to the Corporation for National Service for federal funding. It may be a bit early, but we thought, it's good to get the conversation going. Our goal is to keep the fellows on site for two years."

All the Seattle teaching artists have agreed to stay on for a second year if Musician Corps gets its money. Eduardo Mendonca says, in a way, he and his fellow teaching artists are like doctors. The music they share can be healing, a point of gathering for people overcome by their own problems.

Mendonca: "For thousands of years, people get together through music, play the drums or play on pieces of wood, connect people to celebrate. Music still has this function. It will never stop."

I'm Marcie Sillman, KUOW News.

© Copyright 2010, KUOW