Music plays a big part in people lives, especially teens. That is why it is very important for teens to be active in the arts, most importantly, music. The problem of the young society is that they are too afraid of expressing themselves and are untrue to themselves. Young people are highly influenced by other young people who, often times, are not even being themselves. We believe that not being able to express your self can play a part in teen suicide and teen homicide. We also believe that these insecurities start in middle school and high school. In schools there is a social status hierarchy. If you are not popular, then some teens start name calling which lowers the self esteem of the individuals who catch the brunt of the attacks.

By creating socially relevant musical recordings that reflect on our lives, my project works closely with a team of dedicated collaborators, Sera Radovich, Mary Crosby, Barbara Reed, Jason Ford and Ivonne Garcia to confront the following issues such as of lack of self- expression, one-sided vision, not performing at their full potential and fear of being different. During that process, we will conduct video interviews exploring the connections between teen’s life conditions, participation in the arts, social action and change. We are especially invested in creating a performance and video documentary that shows a connection between socially relevant expression and independence from conformity. We have the goal of putting on a “Change the World” youth benefit for people without homes. We will build on a summer program where a group of teens wrote, recorded and distributed a CD called Catch a Rising Flame. We found that music brought a lot out of us, since it was an easy means of self-expression. This project intends to reach out to new teens and try to better understand them by finding what kind of music they like to listen to and help them create music. By creating and recording music, we intend to create dialogue about how music affects the common teenager and their daily life impacts their musical self-expression. Participating in a project such as this will feed teen’s hunger to do something they love and show that passion is valuable in their lives. Through this project, teens will know there is an outlet through music rather than other things such as drugs, and committing crimes.

We are a group of many youth who see an outlet through music. Our greatest desire at this point is to help other teens understand how beneficial music and the arts really are to our spiritual and mental state of mind. Getting many teenagers involved in our dream as a whole is part of our bigger goal, using Fire Historical and Cultural Arts Collaborative as our base for the beginning of our project. Beginning on January 26, 2009 our program involving teens recording music and understanding the importance of music will take place.

We can use assistance through funding for instructors or the donation of Iflip video cameras.