Well, we are into another semester at KUPE ARTS SOCIETY’s Outside The Box Music Program and so far everything has been great…
KUPE ARTS SOCIETY is a non-profit entity formed by myself, Sway, and Brent Bain to administer the Outside The Box Music Program (OTB). OTB was the brainchild of Sway and Brent Bain and they literally started this thing on a shoestring budget – just two guys wanting to do good in the community.
Sway had the initial idea and they worked to create the program by reaching out to schools in the Parkdale area while subsequently looking for a place to house the project. From idea to implementation Sway estimates that it took them about 1 month. No business plans, no market studies, no sensitivity analysis, just the idea and identification of a need and then action to implement it.
Fast forward a couple years later and OTB is now a program run and administered by KUPE (Kids Understand Practically Everything) ARTS SOCIETY. The program has come a long way, we recently shot this short video for a recent competition, check it out
OTB has served over 120 kids and some 240 parents since inception and while we are seeing some results of our work with students we are not without some challenges.
FINDING A HOME
We are now conducting the program in a space that we have “borrowed” from another organization in the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre. As you can imagine we have significant scheduling constraints during the semester and it is always a challenge to match up space availability with teachers’ schedules. Finding a stable home for the program would enable us to extend the program significantly – to serve more kids, offer more music classes, expand the types of programs we can offer etc.
INSTRUMENTS
The instruments were originally either donated or bought with initial funds but one of our other main constraints is that we don’t have the capability to lend the instruments out to the kids who want to practice while they are not in class. We would really love to give students the opportunity to practice outside of the program and the kids that we serve just don’t have instruments in their home to practice with.
We are presently working on these issues but if you have any suggestions or would like to be a part of the solution, please do not hesitate to reach out to us – jarel@kupearts.org and let me know how you can help. FYI – we are working on our website and it should be up in short order.
Stay Tuned!
