Afterword from Executive Director Corinne Espinoza:

Thanks to a generous donation from area African American business leaders, the Cambridge Community Center was able to take a group of 14 to see Selma on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  Our group had middle schoolers, high schoolers, a first year college student, their teachers and youth workers.  The movie was powerful and difficult to watch. While we know the troubled history of our country, seeing it on the big screen was still startling and elicited reactions ranging the gamut from grief and anger to hope. Led by Kwame Dance, a CCC Board Member and the Director of the Moore Youth Center, we held a debrief with the group afterwards.  We went from one word reactions about the movie to making connections between the past and the present.  We talked about the future that we want.  Our youth talked about racism and inequalities that exist today and discussed what it meant to be a change maker.  We ended our talk with a group of youth fired up to talk to the Cambridge City Council about what could be better in our City.  Thank you donors, for helping us use art as a tool for social change.  

Author: Darrin Korte, Director of Out-of-School Time Programs, The Hip Hop Transformation Program Director

From its inception, hip hop music and culture has represented the voice of a movement. The descendant of spirituals, jazz, blues, and rock, hip hop has evolved through constant innovation to become arguably the most passionate art form in our society today. While many people only think of rap music when they think of hip hop, hip hop culture takes the form of many different genres such as dance, graffiti, DJaying, and fashion. At its core, hip hop still carries this history and message of unity with it. However, due to many outside forces and influences, hip hop has developed an image as being hyper violent, misogynistic, and anti social leading many to believe that hip hop is a negative influence on the youth who consume it.

Author: Darrin Korte, Director of Out-of-School Time Programs, The Hip Hop Transformation Program Director

Last year I was lucky enough to be awarded a grant to run the program of my dreams at the Cambridge Community Center. It was a program that would combine my three biggest passions – social justice, youth work, and hip hop culture. The program was designed to teach teens in the Cambridge area about the history of hip hop culture and the role that it plays in their lives. Then we would teach them the art of hip hop music – how to write, record, and perform their own original music. 

Through this process we would develop conscious consumers who better understood the messages in the music they were listening to. We would develop teens that were comfortable exploring their talents and showcasing them in front of their community. We would combat the negative images often associated with hip hop music with the positive spirit that hip hop grew from. We would demystify the art of lyric writing and make this form of expression accessible to all of the program participants. We would connect them to positive role models in the local hip hop community. Through knowledge and experience we would inspire a transformation in the teens. The Hip Hop Transformation was born.

Author: Sarah Saydun, Cambridge Community Center Development Associate

In a recent interview on NPR, Dr. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist and Center for Culture, Brain, and Development at UCLA, stated that adolescent struggles are more than just raging hormones, they stem from a remodeling of the brain that makes them completely change. It made me reflect on what it was like to be that age – overwhelmed with stress from school, my family, my peers, and struggling to navigate all of the changes going on within myself.  My mom used to tell me “don’t worry, high school won’t last forever”, half kidding, but fully empathizing, remembering her adolescent experience and the struggles she went through as an awkward teen trying to fit in.