Community Work
Fulani has worked on a number of community outreach and youth development projects. In 1984, she helped found the Castillo Cultural Center in New York City, which produces mostly plays written by Newman, in an unusual arrangement. In 1998, the Castillo Center merged with the All Stars Project youth charity and broadened the single base for Newman's work. Fulani has been active in the development of educational programs associatedd with the All Stars Project, including the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth and the All Stars Talent Show Network, which create enriching experiences outside school for poor inner city youth, using a performance model. Fulani described her approach in Derrick Bell's 2004 book Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform:
We teach young people to use performance skills to become more cosmopolitan and sophisticated—to interact with the worlds of Wall Street, with business and the arts. In becoming more cosmopolitan— in going beyond their narrow and parochial and largely nationalistic identities—they acquire a motivation to learn as a part of consistently creating and recreating their lives.
In 2004 the Anti-Defamation League criticized the All Stars/Castillo theater troupe for its play Crown Heights, accusing the playwright of blaming the riots on the Jewish community. The play dramatized events of the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn after a motorcade of the Lubavitcher rabbi accidentally killed a seven-year-old Caribbean-American child. The accident ignited long-standing tensions in the community; in street violence, a visiting Australian rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was stabbed to death by Lemrick Nelson, a 16-year-old Crown Heights youth.
A local Brooklyn paper described the play favorably.
Read more about this topic: Lenora Fulani
Famous quotes containing the words community and/or work:
“Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and a cosmopolitan. But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism, too, is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from the community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years, but a populist will always remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.”
—John Lukacs (b. 1924)
“Men should not labor foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as possible, work and rest together, and then the work will be of such a kind that when the body is hungry the brain will be hungry also, and the same food will suffice for both; otherwise the food which repairs the waste energy of the overwrought body will oppress the sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)