Trinity Housing Corporation
The Kaleidoscope Youth Program (KYP) is a six-week, all-volunteer-taught, laugh-a-minute summer program for kids at Island Grove Village Apartments (IGV) and the surrounding community. IGV is a HUD (Housing and Urban Development) low-income housing complex in Greeley’s impoverished, primarily Hispanic northeast side, and KYP is one of the few, free summer programs available which provides structured, supervised activities. The CCA sponsored “Visiting Artists Series” (VAS) artists quite literally brought a variety of folk artists and cultures to these kids in ways no MTV or X-Box ever can, by engaging, intriguing, and educating them through hands-on, participatory entertainment.
Over 100 kids from IGV, the City of Greeley Summer Recreation Program, and a nearby Habitat for Humanity community listened, sang, rhymed, drummed, chanted, danced, and created with Native Americans, a Cowboy Poet, and an Hispanic folk artist. They asked youthfully-honest questions and received direct answers, even when the questions definitely would be considered inappropriate in the MTV, X-Box, adult world. They touched and shared, dreamed aloud and bragged about their own family heritage. The “Visiting Artist Series” brought real people – people of heart and culture – into these kids' community and showed them in tangible and wonderfully intangible ways that their lives could extend beyond the walls of a low-income housing project and maybe even as far away as their own roots, their own culture, their own heritage.
George Antuna, a member of Teresa McNeill’s Morningstar Drum Group, chanted traditional songs with silly lyrics about Mickey and Minnie Mouse, low-riders, and getting sick in school, passing his homemade drums around and encouraging the kids to pound away. It was hot, over 100 degrees, and sweat ran down his face, even in the shade of the large tree where he sat cross-legged in a casual circle with the kids. He brought a friend with him, introducing him as "Tom," who, it turned out, grew up at Island Grove Village Apartments. George told of his own involvement in gangs, the trouble that landed him in prison, while Tom waved a burning sage bundle in the air. “I had to be put away, far away from my family, in prison” George said, “before I could face who I was and then who I wanted to be.”
At the end of his presentation, he moaned a long, sonorous prayer he said he wanted to offer up to all the boys and girls around him. When he finished, the girl sitting next to him said that it looked like he was crying. “I was,” George said, “for you, for all of you, so that you might learn today that you only need to look inside yourself, to your family, to your roots, to find out who you are, instead of drugs and gangs and trouble.” George and Tom received a lot of hugs as they made their way to their car. “He’s pretty cool,” the girl said as kids wandered back to the classroom. “It’s like, you know, he’s really kind of one of us, you know?"
The VAS turned out to be so much more enriching than the participants imagined it would be; wide-eyed kids finding beauty in simple art, the honesty and openness of the questions and the answers, the awakening of cultural pride in the young and old alike. Even after the last cowboy poem or beat of a handmade drum has faded, the wonder and the excitement of discovery will continue for years to come.Excerpted from Final Report Trinity Housing Corporation, by Thom Mahoney
