Initiatives

Music Video Production Academy
Thats a Good Look!

The Harambee Music and Video Production Academy serves at-risk and other urban youth through an intensive immersion experience that allows them to master and become conversant in all aspects of the content production industries (video, audio, online, broadcast etc).

Youth are exposed to non-traditional and entrepreneurial professional options. More importantly, the Production Academy offers an escape route from the oft-captivating (and imprisoning) lure of violence, drugs, and acceptance of mediocrity so often plaguing the inner cities of the Harambee Super-Village of greater Newark, East & West Orange.

The Production Academy consistently reinforces positive messages coupled with tangible short-term as well as strategic results and engages students in replicating positive aspects of the hip-hop genre to attract and build relationships with youth in the community.

The customized curriculum being utilized by the Production Academy was developed by Youth Entertainment Studios (Y.E.S.), a Chesapeake, Virginia based organization. It is a values-based curriculum designed to be a user-friendly road map to connect the passion of the youth participants with critical youth development objectives geared toward equipping the youths for success in school.
Erica Branch-Ridley, an Emmy award winning producer from the Tri-state area, serves as Chair of the Advisory Council of the Production Academy.

The Harambee Music and Video Production Academy builds upon strengths and excellence of an existing youth/community group known as G-fy-G established in 2001 under the direction of Hugh Davis, an accomplished composer, director, educator, recording artist, and workshop clinician.

This sophisticated cadre of well trained youth has captivated audiences with their diversified performance repertoire that includes high energy singing, dancing, stepping, and rapping. The Production Academy is a means of expanding the talent, reach, and potential of this unique urban performance genre.

G-fy-G is comprised of at-risk African American youth ages 12-18. Vocal excellence, movement precision, synchronization, versatility, and stage presence is stressed. G-fy-G is credited with transforming the lives and futures of countless inner-city teens.

As a direct of the discipline and structure associated with this program, youth have shunned the lure of drugs and gangs, attended college, and become mentors to younger children.

There are over one hundred and fifty (150) youth in the combined cultural and educational components of this community based program.