Music & The Morrisania Band Project
Elissa Carmona is the Director of the Morrisania Band Program (MBP), a project for musicians to hone their skills while positively affecting the Bronx community through social initiatives and community engagement.[3] The band is partnered with DreamYard, an organization which collaborates with Bronx youth, families, and schools to build pathways to equity and opportunity through the arts.[4] DreamYard provides the band with a space to practice twice a week, and the band is made up of individuals as young as nineteen to adults with heads of grey hair –– as long as the participant has an interest in music, they can get involved.
Elissa started the program after she got let off as the grant writer from her previous job due to lack of funding. But Elissa remained hopeful: “I was thinking if I can do grant writing… for an individual and now a group and an agency, I could probably do it for myself.” Through research, Elissa learned of things she had never heard together before, like fiscal sponsors. She also learned of individual artist grants and artist councils, which became the main source of funding for the Morrisania Band Program. In 2016, the group received two grants from the Bronx Council on the Arts: the Arts Funds grant and the Artists for Community grant. The mission of the Bronx Council on the Arts is to advocate for cultural equity by nurturing the development of a diverse array of artists and arts organizations, and by building strong cultural connections in and beyond The Bronx.[5] Thus far in 2017, the band has won three more grants, including a 2017 Neighborhood Grant from Citizens Committee for New York City, another 2017 Arts Funds grant, and “in our backyard” selected MBP for the 2017 Healthy Neighborhoods Challenge to host a benefit concert for sickle cell disease (SCD) awareness.
The SCD awareness project hits close to home for Elissa because in the U.S., the disease primarily affects African-Americans, but the health care for sickle cell gets little funding or attention. A recent study found that “cystic fibrosis, a disease that affects primarily Caucasians, occurs in only a third of the numbers affected by SCD, but received 3.5 times more NIH funding. Private funding from foundations was about 400 times higher for cystic fibrosis! Unsurprisingly, Johns Hopkins researchers John Strouse and Carlton Haywood note that no drugs were approved between 2010 and July 2013 for the treatment of SCD compared with five for cystic fibrosis.”[6] Elissa says race is not her focus, however, because “the fact of the matter is I live in this community that happens to have people suffering from this. There are no services, there are no support groups here.” Elissa is greatly looking forward to using music as a means of cultivating awareness around the issue. An opportunity to donate or show your support can be found here: https://www.ioby.org/project/benefit-concert-sickle-cell-disease-awareness.
This is not the first time Elissa has used music as a form of activism. Elissa believes sending your message through art makes anything more memorable for the person listening and the person creating it. But for Elissa, “empowerment” is the word she prefers. While the band plays love songs here and there, Elissa tries to keep their music focused around empowerment. “I’m a black woman, and there’s always that stigma of… ‘why is she so angry?’ And I’m not –– that’s just how life is. So, you hear activism and you associate it with a black woman… less likely to get heard.” How do you see art being used as a form of empowerment in your community?
[3]morrisaniaband.wordpress.com/
[4]www.dreamyard.com/about/
[5]www.bronxarts.org/mission.asp
[6]www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2015/06/19/sickle-cell-disease-highlights-racial-disparities-in-healthcare/#60ed34e83b75
