The Raise Up Project begins with you.
If you are 15-22 years old, we invite you to speak to why so many young people are leaving high school before graduation.
Raise Up features an online hip hop and spoken word competition. Five individual winners will each receive a $5,000 educational scholarship* and a trip to Washington DC to perform at the Kennedy Center on September 28 as part of the Raise Up Project culminating event. One group piece will also be selected to receive a $2,500 award.
Winners will be selected through a three-round process in which the American public and guest judges vote for the pieces that have the most resonance to them (Final Judges include Rosario Dawson and Russell Simmons). After the event at the Kennedy Center, the participants in The Raise Up Project have the opportunity to be featured in a series on National Public Radio that will air in late 2014.
Why The Raise Up Project?
It is critical that young people have an opportunity to celebrate educational success stories, and to move to the center of the conversation about the personal and institutional factors that contribute to young people leaving high school without graduating. We believe that new perspectives and new solutions need to be brought to the table, so we are inviting young people to raise their voices and be heard.
We invite young people to share their stories, struggles, successes, and questions with each other and with the American population at large, including leaders in the educational reform movement. We want you to be a part of combatting the isolation so many students feel.
According to almost all research, young people who do not graduate from high school face increased obstacles throughout their lives, including higher rates of incarceration, shorter life spans, worse overall health, and less earning power than their peers with degrees. Yet thousand drops our daily. Whether you want to highlight student champions, or want to share your perspective on how you think it’s the school system as a whole failing – or maybe you think it’s individual schools, youth themselves or a combination of multiple factors – we want to hear from young people in their own words.
For many teenagers, an unfortunate gap exists between the importance and power of a good education, and whether or not their schools are safe places where nurturing yet rigorous educations can happen.
The Raise Up Project will look at the complexity of the drop-out crisis from multiple youth perspectives. We invite you to share your graduation success stories, to talk about individual and familial responsibility, the importance of graduating, the outside pressures, under-resourced schools and teachers, school safety, over-reliance on testing, and varying cultural barriers that get in the way from getting the degree.
To enter The Raise Up Project contest, click here.
