THE POINT CDC Yearbook 2009 - 2010

2009 2010

Alyan Martinez Andres Vallecillo Deanny Diaz Deborah Garcia Jabari Emers

Jared Prioleau Josafat Moreira Jose Rodriguez Jacob Martinez

Group B

Anthony Rodriguez Alexandra Rivera Cordel Davidson Daniel Gonazalez Elijah Guerrier

Emily Carrera Lizbeth Gomez Marcus Hunter Noelia Dume Randy Marin

Group C

Carlos Delgado Mathew Baez Pedro Lopez

Robert Sola Taja Graves-Parker Yanytza Batista Yaxeny Hernandez Micheal Nunez

Group A

Group D

Group E

Group F

Cassandra Grullon Chasity Ayala Crystal Diamond Fairouza Mamadou Janasia Allen

Jason Solis Javier Roman Jeremy Carrera Jeremy Morales Juan Sanchez

Aeryanne Diaz Breta Paul Britney Cuevas Justin Vargas Khilali Marquez

Maxiel Madora Pernell Robbins Richard Ochoa Rodrigo Avila Damien Vallecillo

Daniel Hunter Diamond Scott Juan Marin Khadijza Farnell

Peter Rivera Tajanae Harris Jesus Negron Erykah Solano Bradlee Toran

Teacher: Mr. Ernesto Nuñez

Literacy

One of the literacy program’s biggest goals this year was to stimulate a new exciting position on reading. Through additions like The NEA Big Read, students in groups D & F participated in lessons that involved cooking, games, and online research. This enabled students to make connections between the text and some of their personal interests. Groups A, B, & C achieved this goal as well by creating their own texts. Group A worked on many different phonetic rules (long and short vowel sounds and letter recognition) and ended the year by each student creating their own alphabet book. Groups B & C also put together their texts by comparing two of the same stories written by two different authors but maintaining the same plot line. Group B students created their own version of the “The Little Red Hen,” and group C students created their version of “The Three Little Pigs”. For the final showcase Yanitza in group C presented her story to the entire after school program. I am very proud of all the students’ hard work, dedication and execution of this year’s main objective.

Starfish City Year P.S. 48 Alcoa 2009-2010 Team: Ashanti Williams, April Greeson, Chauvet Bishop, Dan Seamans, Ellis Bullock, Kieran OConnor, Krystine Dykes, Mai-Len Kennedy, Mike Hannon, Phil Ellison, and Vicki Cohen.

Starfish is a community service learning-based afterschool program. Starfish is designed on the belief that no matter how old one is, they can still be involved in community change. Starfish is composed of different units which include Peace and Love, Needs and Wants, and The Environment. During each of these units, students explore topics and conclude with a service project at the end of each unit.

Teacher: Mr. Craig Tindal

Although our music program was slowed by the unfortunate flooding of the Sound Studio in November that didn’t stop us.

We were able rescue some of our equipment and still hold our ASP music appreciation classes in other parts of THE POINT with the help of City Year.

Music

Our youngsters in groups A & B put on a Mariachi presentation celebrating the music of Mexico in connection with the NEA Big Read Project’s Sun Stone & Shadows. Our teen bands continued on with evening rehearsals in the “Live From the Edge Theatre” and several performances including “Bronx Building Bronx” and the Downtown Arts Festival.

Diaspora Music Teacher: TreZure Taylor Brazilian Music: Groups C & D studied the music, culture and portuguese language as singers and samba dancers during the 2009-2010 school year. First studying Brazilian percussion and the caxixi instrument, the 8-11 year olds found similarities between Brazilian culture and their own. This year they learned to sing two classic Antonio Carlos Jobim songs as well as a basic samba routine that they will perform during the final presentation and Fish Parade.

The After School Program Final Showcase 2010

Visual Arts

Teacher: Tyrone Brown-Osborne Director: Carey Clark

Super Heroes and Snow Men Group C & D Students were asked to invent portraits of themselves as superheroes. They learned how to use a film, camera and design a panel through deconstructing and reassembling the images they took.

The same process was used with the classical “snowman� image.

Mixed media artists at work

Teacher: Carolina Diaz Director: Carey Clark

Visual Arts Recycled Picadas... Group F was able to make art about saving the Earth through the tradition of Mexican Picadas, paper cut outs used for celebrations. The students used vinyl material and recycled soda cans to create images and text about recycling. Big ups to Erykah, Juan, Kadijah, Danny, Tajanae, Jesus, Diamond and Christian.

Rocking the Boat Mural...

Fish Parade logo…

Erykah, Kadijah, Tajanae and Jesus from group F sketched out ideas for the Fish Parade using the theme for this year’s parade - Get Connected People, Parks, Progress.

Group F assisted in the ideas for the THE POINT/ Rocking the Boat collaboration for a 100 foot mural that will be placed on the Garlic Factory façade between Rocking The Boat’s new location on Edgewater and THE POINT’s Riverside Campus for the Arts and The Environment.

Adam Green invited the students to explore their indoor aquariums filled with Bronx River cohabitants --crabs, shrimp, snails and plant life. Students also sketched the wild life from the tanks. They helped to prime the panel of wood boards and are using salvaged materials to create colorful collages representing the 3 miles of estuary where fresh water and salt water combine and is now a safe environment for the animals that breed and live there - - not unlike The POINT and Rocking the Boat providing a creative and safe environment for the students where we live and work together. Thanks to Juan, Erykah, Jesus, Tajanae and the volunteers that helped to make this project great one.

Cirque du Monde

This has been a very exciting year with Cirque du Monde at THE POINT. Coach Program Coordinator, Deven facilitated the strong, creative and enthusiastic team of: Andy, Josh, Keith, Amy, Ellie, Victor and visiting coach Sara. Students from the After-School Program, and Teen Program presented Showcases in December and June highlighting their favorite activities in Cirque, like shadowy silks, diabolo, sunny stilts & tumbling, wave-like juggling, a rock ‘n roll trampoline act and some crazy clowning.

Cirque du Monde is one of the greatest sources of pride for Cirque du Soleil. Set in motion in 1995, this programme is now operating in more than 80 communities throughout the world in partnership with Jeunesse du Monde, Oxfam International and many community organizations recognized in their milieu for the quality of their work with young people.

ICP @ THE POINT

ICP @ The Point Staff: Melanie Diaz, Alicia Clarke and Tiffany Williams

Jazmin Velez

Kydanis Clase

Alex Hernandez

ICP @ THE POINT instructors : Jaime Schlesinger, Bami Adedoyin, Bayete Ross Smith, Isabel Foley, G. Giraldo, Kae Newcomb

During the 2009-2010 school year, ICP at THE POINT celebrated our 21st Vantage Point exhibition entitled, “Personal Vision”. The opening reception was a success, seeing a large crowd of family and friends supporting our students. This was the first year we created postcard size versions of our students’ photographs, which was a crowd pleaser.

We are excited to announce 13 of our students are graduating high school this year and attending college in the fall, some colleges they plan to attend include, SUNY Binghamton, CUNY John Jay, Quinnipiac University and CUNY LaGuardia Community College, among others.

Along with our college bound students, a handful of our students this summer with be participating in summer art programs at organizations such as Pratt Institute.

During the school year, many of our students had the opportunity to work with new camera equipment, allowing them to continue to develop their education in photography. We were also fortunate to continue to have guest photographers visit our classes and have the opportunity to work with our students.

Many of our pre-teen students come from Bronx Charter School for the Arts. As a result, we decided to have a photo exhibition at their school, highlighting the relation shipICP @ THE POINT has with Bronx Charter School for the Arts as well as allowing our students to show their teachers and schoolmates their artwork. It was a success and something we hope to continue not only at Bronx Charter School for the Arts but at other schools where our ICP students also attend.

Teachers: Adam Liebowitz

Sharon De La Cruz

A.C.T.I.O.N.

(Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood)

Happening Habit/ Environmental Stewardship The North Brother Island project came to a close this year, but Happening Habitat and our environmental stewardship work will continue! We visited the island in the fall to remove invasive species, created a new native wildflower garden at THE POINT that was featured on our tour during Wildflower Week, and began constructing our new rain water harvesting system with the Bronx River Alliance.

GO GREEN! As always we are working on informing people about environmental justice issues and the benefits of going green.

This year we helped plan the first ever NYC Youth Summit on Climate Justice held in April. We also made our own stop-motion animation video which is available on our youtube page “thepointaction”. Throughout the year we held workshops and tours for many groups like Bowling Green University, Norwegian students from the United Methodist Seminar Program, and STRIVE. We also presented at the New School Race & the Environment Symposium, the first Bronx Food Summit, Bronx Parks SpeakUp, South Bronx Earth Fest, and the Highway to Health Youth Expo. And of course, we led the presentations at our The POINT’s annual Town Hall in March.

A.C.T.I.O.N.

Urban Agriculture Our food and farming projects took off this year! We held the South Bronx Food & Film Expo in December, created a brand new garden down at THE POINT’s Campus, and grew food in our indoor growing unit with grow lights, Earthboxes, and a vertical A-Frame.

All this in addition to our regular garden up at THE POINT. We expect to have a huge harvest later in the summer! We also learned about food policies and nutrition thanks to the Health Equity Project we participated in with Hunter graduates Milyoung and Derrecia.

Through this project we also conducted a Community Food Assessment for Hunts Point.

A.C.T.I.O.N.

College Trips During spring break we visited Marist College, SUNY New Paltz, Hunter College, and Cooper Union. At the colleges we took tours, sat in on classes, ate in the dining halls, had info sessions, and met current students. At Cooper Union we also got to see Sharon present about her time in Peru as a Fulbright scholar.

Extras We had lots of special events all year long.

The year kicks off with games during our orientation. Soon afterwards we host our families and past ACTION students at the annual ACTION Family & Alumni Holiday Dinner. This year we got to attend two Cirque du Soleil shows, and our good friend Alex hooked up a visit and tour of UNESCO and the United Nations. Jenny even spoke about education as the key youth speaker to an audience of world leaders at the UN! We also continued the tradition of running program for the after-school students on the last Friday of every month for Fun Fridays. Finally, we will end our year with a day-long celebration of food and fun at a farm in upstate New York.

A.C.T.I.O.N. Tafiani

Misra

Evonny

Alexis

Jenny

ACTION says goodbye to all of our graduating seniors: Tafiani Watson will attend SUNY Potsdam, Jenny Mena will attend Lafayette College, Evonny Escoto will attend Fordham University, Mariamu Sillah will attend SUNY Cortland, Misra Walker will finish her GED, Alexis Ruiz will attend Pittsburgh Technical Institute, Amanda Malave will attend Manhattan Community College, and Michael Brodie will attend Bronx Community College. Congratulations on finishing High School!

Have a great time at college and come back to visit us soon, we will miss you!

Mariamu

Amanda

Michael

No Beef Thursdays Coordinator: Danny Peralta, Cirque Team, Efrain Rodriguez, Carey Clark, Jill Roche, NYCARES tutors.

No Beef Thursdays - Thursdays 645-845PM No Beef Thursdays is a weekly vegetarian meal and arts drop-in for teenagers from the various THE POINT wide initiatives and the community.

Youth are treated to “no beef” meals which are created in collaboration with HPAC’s Heather Mills Healthy Food Initiative and Bascom Catering @ THE POINT. Once meals are over, students segue into formal classes with Cirque du Monde, My Life with the Wave Visual Arts, NYCares academic tutoring, and special guests, workshops and film screenings. No Beef Thursdays serves as a space for High School-aged young adults to express themselves, learn something new and fun, and exist in a safe cultural space that promotes the idea of “no beef”.

Aficionado Workshops -- My Life with the Wave Mural workshops were based on My Life with the Wave, by Octavio Paz. It is the story of a man who takes a wave home from the ocean to his house in Mexico City. She is a wave of great complexity who embodies all the qualities water and womanhood. She can be a charming babbling brook or a formidable tempest at sea. This story is part of an anthology of 20 Mexican short stories, Sun, Stone, Shadows, promoted by NEA in their BIG READ project and a big part of THE POINT this year. Some of the ideas developed in these workshops will be part of Carey’s mural in the Sims Mural project.

NYC Bridge Project

Leader: Danny Peralta

Glenn Wright

NYC Bridge Project The NYC Bridge Project is an artist collective of concerned photographers telling personal stories about issues pertinent to their respective communities.

The aim of the artists is to tell those stories that are not commonly covered by mainstream media. Current members include Bashira Webb, Miguel Anaya, Mark Nevers, Carlos Inamagua, Alberto Inamagua, Misra Walker, Richard Palacios, Ryan Smith, Joseph Gilmore, Glenn Wright (RIP) Joseph Gilmore and Danny Peralta.

Richard Palacios

Carlos Inamagua

Alberto Inamagua This project is very dear to me for many reasons, and that is why I have used TPCDC to hold our regular meetings. It stems from my participation in ICP @ THE POINT and subsequent Jocelyn Benzakin Fellowship in 2005. As a way to continue to work together and add on members that we could mentor as young documentarians, we applied for and were awarded the Howard Chapnick Award in 2007. Last week’s participation in the @ The Heart of TPCDC show was our second big showing since 2008 when we had a group show called Departure that was up from May thru October of that Misra Walker year at the Bruckner Bar and Grill Gallery.

Eco Ryders

Leaders: Victor Davila and Kendrick Martinez Eco Ryders is a youth led organization created to teach kids about the environment through workshops and skateboards. As an incentive to come to the environmental workshops, the Eco Ryders students where taught how to make skateboard designs.

Members presented at SUNY New Paltz conference on Arts and Community Development.

Leader: Sharon De La Cruz Mentor: Maria Teresa Fernandez

W.O.M.E.N. Where Our Minds Empower Needs

Members: Linda Collazo, Alexis Davila, Misra Walker, Samantha Serrano, Amanda Mercado, Teresa Rivera, Jenny Mena.

This is the first year of the WOMEN’s group and the goal was to train our youth to become leaders in the fight for equal reproductive rights. As Black and Latina Women, we are the highest at risk for contracting STI’s and HIV. This is not a coincidence!

The way Woman’s Reproductive Health is outreached, to the Black and Latino community, is not as efficient nor effective. The youth in our program went through a 6 week HIV/safe sex workshop that helped them put into perspective their roles in managing and talking about their healths. Not only did we talk and hold workshops with the group, but we also began to think about outreach. During the Fish Parade we will outreach using different creative projects the youth will present. The ultimate goal is to become creative with the information learned so that people can become more emotionally connected to their healths and take it more seriously.

Our group is unique in that it combines sex education with the Arts, bridging the gap between how information is learned and retained. During our 11 weeks we held healing circles, LGBTQ sex education workshops, creative writing classes, mural making, and role playing! This is a group for women identified youth between the ages of 13 and 21 who wish to empower themselves and their community / a safe space for women who are straight, lesbian, bi and transgender of all cultural backgrounds.

Big Read THE POINT CDC kicks off the NEA Big Read 2010 with Sun, Stone, and Shadows books being read and discussed throughout New York City. Aside from our scheduled events for March 2010, various organizations are using Sun, Stone, and Shadows books in their classrooms for all ages in both English and Spanish. Discussions have thus taken place at the Hunts Point Library, HOPE, the 41st Precinct Community Affairs Office, THE POINT CDC Afterschool Program, Bronx Charter School for the Arts, City Year Bronx Programs, Mommas Hip-Hop Kitchen, Bronx River Alliance, La Casa Azul Bookstore, UNITAS, El Museo Del Barrio, and more.

Junior Ambassadors Volunteer Teachers : Johan Suarez and Danny Peralta

The Junior Ambassadors is an Afterschool Alliance funded project that works with youth from various afterschool programs in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx (Graham Windham, PAL, Manida Rec Center, & THE POINT CDC). They worked on an initiative entitled, “Hands Across Hunts Point�, that allowed selected youth from across afterschool programs in Hunts Point to meet and train to become Junior Ambassadors, advocating for the funding of afterschool programs in their community. Selected youth sat in on 2 advocacy workshops (October 17, 2009 & March 6, 2010) and marched at the 24th Annual New South Bronx Halloween Parade on October 23rd, the 7th Annual Fish Parade, as well as meetings with local legislators. Youth were trained to speak before legislators and media about the role afterschools have on their personal lives. By the end of these, Junior Ambassadors embody the following attributes: Leadership (in the arts, education, sports and youth development), Articulation (be able to speak clearly before a group of people and the press about the impact afterschools play in their lives) & Critical thinking (have the ability to think abstractly about the current financial crisis in America).

Acknowledgements THE POINT is happy to celebrate another great year (2009-2010) of incredible arts programming in service to Hunts Point! With so many budget cuts in the future and so many either looking for or losing jobs it is important to acknowledge the things that we should be grateful for. THE POINT would not be able to deliver the level of services that we do if it were not for the amazing staff, volunteers, and teaching artists dedicated to our mission of revitalizing Hunts Point. Thank you so much for choosing THE POINT where community and creativity continue to connect.

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTGRAPHY, A.C. T.I.O.N., BASCOM CATERING, UNITAS, CITY YEAR, PROJECT HOPE, BRIDGE PROJECT, AUDUBON SOCIETY, PROJECT HEART, 2008-2009 CITY YEAR 48 CORP MEMBERS Micah, Kimmie, & Shawanna, THE HUNTS POINT ALLIANCE FOR CHILDREN, BRONX CHARTER SCHOOL FOR THE ARTS, PS 48 THE GREATEST SCHOOL IN THE UNIVERSE, ALCOA FOUNDATION, THE ENDOWMENT FOR INNER CITY SCHOOLS, WILDCAT CORPORATION, THE DOOR THE POINT STAFF: MARIA TORRES, KELLIE TERRY-SEPULVEDA, RACHELLE FERNANDEZ, TERESA KOCHIS, IRENE PEREZ, DANIA SILVERIO, ROBERT JOHNSON, DANNY PERALTA, CAREY CLARK, MARIE DAVIS, SHARON DE LA CRUZ, ALEJANDRA DELFIN, MELANIE DIAZ, JONATHAN FRETT, ADAM LIEBOWITZ, LOUISE MATHIES, ERNESTO NUNEZ, DEVEN SISLER, EARL SKINNER, CRAIG TINDAL. TEACHING ARTISTS: JOSH MATHEWS, KEITH NELSON, ANDY SAPORA, VICTOR VAUBAN. ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE: CAROLINA DIAZ, FREDDY SEPULVEDA, TREZURE TAYLOR, NELSON ALIVAS, KATHLEENA GARCIA VOLUNTEER TEACHERS: MIKE ZAMM, EFRAIN AND EVELYN, TYRONE BROWN OSBORNE, NANA ADON, KIM KORONA, PATRICK KYLE, JUNIOR, JOY SUTTON. VOLUNTEERS: JOAHAN SUAREZ, CESAR CISNEROS. ACTION VOLUNTEERS: ALEX KUDRYAVTSEV, DAMIAN GRIFFIN, DEVORA SHARPE, STEVE RITZ, JULIE PONCELET, ERIK KARF, LUCIA HERNANDEZ, KIM MATHEWS. NY CARES TUTORS: PRISCILLA TINIA, ANDREW, STACY, ALEXIS, JESSICA, SHAMIEKA, NIKKI, DANNY. WOMEN IDENTIFIED EMPOWERMENT GROUP ANNA ECHEVARRIA, EARL SKINNER, CARMEN CORCHADO, KIMBERLYNN ACEVEDO INTERNS: ANDY, KATIRIA, OSIRIS, SHAWN, RANDALL, BASHEEM, LUCIA, ELBERT, KIBIN, ANELL, WILL. THE UNITAS RED FAMILY: LUIS, HECTOR, STEPHANIE, LUCY, AMBER, MATHEW, SCOTT, DAVID, CRISTINA, PAULA.

Exiting

We will Miss You!!

Autographs