hope for Salone

Salone, an art exhibition  featuring Long Beach artists, will premiere for one night in Long Beach, California in late January. The event is a fundraiser for the Creative Arts Initiative, a program founded by Ali Kamanda, Julia Jordan, and myself, to help young girls in the Koinadugu District of Sierra Leone express themselves creatively in conjunction with academic schooling. The construction of the school will launch in January 2011, with pilot programs occuring next March and June. The school itself will focus on four creative arts iniatives: photography, songwriting,  filmmaking and creative writing.

To get a general idea of the need of schooling in Sierra Leone, a few statistics*:

(Keep in mind that the Koinadugu District is the poorest in Sierra Leone, so these statistics may be higher than in the area)

The adult illiteracy rate in Sierra Leone is 61.9% of the population

Within that 61.9%, female as a percent of male is 53.5% (in other words, the number of girls in school is half of that of boys)

76% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, with 53.4% living on less than $1 a day.

Only 26.8% of adult women are literate.

*UNDP’s Human Development Index 2009

These are only numbers but give you some sort of idea about the lack of education and the basic needs that need immediate attention. CAI hopes not only to get girls into school but to give them the means by which to express themselves creatively through music, writing, filmmaking and photography. Thank you guys so much for your support, I hope this event can not only be a creative outlet for Long Beach artists but also be a condiut for the same to happen in Salone. If you are interesting in premiering your work at the exhibition please email me at cburkard@csulb.edu, and be prepared to submit a portfolio of some of the work you hope to show. We really want to recognize as many artists as we can, and the space is huge (22,000 square feet) so we’ve got a lot of space to fill.  More to come soon. Thanks everyone.

Casey