Lenora Fulani - Community Work

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.