Celebrating Early Childhood Initiatives with Hope Starts Here
On November 22, 2019, Living Arts' artists and staff joined hundreds of educators, parents, funders, and other change-makers for the 3rd Annual Hope Starts Here Celebration. Hope Starts Here is a movement initiated in 2016 stewarded by the W.K.Kellogg Foundation and the Kresge Foundation to:
create a vision for what early childhood can look like in Detroit
develop a framework for that vision and
inspire folks from all over the city to get involved and help bring that vision to life.
Teaching Artist Alesha Brown led an invocation “Free to Be Me” at the Hope Starts Here celebration.
Grounded in the belief that every child has the right to access high quality early childhood education from birth, our city got to work! Since then, Living Arts and many other groups, have come together to have futuristically-minded and frank conversation around the quality of early childhood education. It truly is awe-inspiring to share this space with incredible parents, teachers, early childhood directors, funders and so many others. We are proud and humbled to be an arts partner to this movement! Together with our incredible team of artists, parents, and staff, we've been able to bring focus and intention around quality in Head Start/Early Head Start classrooms, informal caregiving settings, independently owned provider settings, and community-based settings that serve families.
Master Teaching Artist Kimberli Boyd led a movement-based invocation at the Hope Starts Here celebration.
We were honored to be invited to present the invocations for this event. Our amazing artists, Alesha Brown and Kimberli Boyd, of Living Arts' Detroit Wolf Trap program can typically be found day-in, day-out, working with early childhood teachers and their children to make learning come to life through music and movement. But on this day of celebration, Alesha and Kimberli were able to share a special part of themselves, as Detroiters and masters of music and movement, in a call to action. Alesha's "Free to be me" morning invocation brought life to the meaning of "Hope Starts with Me." Kim's movement-based afternoon invocation brought the entire room of stakeholders together in a call to action, powering our collective commitment to ensuring that every child and family can access early childhood in Detroit.
We are thrilled to partake in this movement that respects children and their families and we look forward to building more into the future together.
