Giant Steps: SUFC January through May 2017

Thanks to our ongoing and new supporters, Sticking Up For Children has been able to advance on several fronts during the first five months of 2017. A fourth grant from the Jennifer Maxwell Foundation, through the Marin Community Foundation, let us immediately extend more funding to the Kuumba Institute of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center and to the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants orphanage and its companion Ecole Pour les Enfants in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

A grant from President Arnie Fielkow of the National Basketball Retired Players Association let us help to complete delivery of 15,000 pounds of rice to parts of Haiti devastated by Hurricane Matthew.

Between January and April we hosted two Music & Arts Days and two 3D-Printing Workshops in New Orleans during the first four months of 2017.

James and Adrienne Catalano of Future Factory led the 3D-Printing Workshops at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center.

On March 11 we hosted our first Music & Arts Day of 2017. Again the turning of drumsticks into art by parents and children with paint-pens

was enhanced by Damas Fanfan Louis drumming from his treasure of

more than 4000 Haitian rhythms. In March, too, we bought a generator to bring electricity to the EPE school.

EPE is companion to the FEPE orphanage in Port-au- Prince and serves more than 160 students

In April we took big steps toward empowering our youth-education partners’ students for 3D-printing of both objets d’art and parts for prosthetic limbs. On April 7 James Catalano scanned with his DJI Mavik Pro Drone several of the epic sculptures of New Orleans’ musicians and other culture-bearers in Armstrong Park. Here's james with Shalene Jones

Adnele's suitably larger-than-life-size sculpture of Tootie Montana, Big Chief

of all the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian tribes till his death in 2005.

Here's video of James with his DJI Mavik Pro Drone, scanning the sculpture of Louis Armstrong.

James then 3D-printed a statuette of Shalene Jones-Adenle’s life-size, magnificent, and respectfully detailed sculpture of Big Chief Tootie Montana, the hugely gifted suit-maker who was leader of Mardi Gras Indians’ turn to competing as artists rather than as warriors/

The highly detailed statuette that James later 3D-printed was a focus of his and his wife Adrienne's presentation to students from the Kuumba Institute and Adinkranola and Warren Easton and other schools on Saturday, afternoon of April 22. We combined our Music & Arts Day with the 3D-Printing Workshop and simulcast the presentation to students from three schools in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

The students from the FEPE orphanage and EPE school and College Canapé-Vert were so engaged that they stayed to review the entire

presentation on their monitor at CCV.

On April 22 we were also joined by the Community Works' Childrens' Choir, led by Stikcing Up For Children's longtime friend Cole Williams. Alari Cai Neville and Cyri Cadenza Neville added to the big smiles. Check 'em out!

Here are Maryse and Cole in another photo by the wonderful Keith Hill.

In May Sticking Up For Children moved forward to partner with three young inventors of 3D-printed prosthetic limbs. Joe Fairley of Saratoga Springs, NY, Josh Coutts of Victoria, BC, and Henry Warder of Duke University have formed the 3DLLP company to implement their 'Lower Limb System’. They now testing their 3D-printed above-the-knee and below-the-knee prostheses in partnership with the Markforged 3D-printer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their innovations in prostheses promise multiple benefits to amputees in the developing world and the modern, industrialized world.

Maryse and I met Joe Fairley and Josh Coutts last June when they were among instructors for a 3D-Printing Workshop at Healing Hands of Haiti in Port-au-Prince. They taught three teachers from College Canapé-Vert and EPE over six days of an intensive Workshop at HHH in June 2016.

Here are Joe and Josh with patients receiving upper-limb prostheses at

Healing Hands of Haiti in 2016.

They’re serious, vigorous, principled and accomplishing people. We look forward to doing great things with them in the remainder of 2017.

You can read a greal deal more about our plans for Campaign 2017 in the

tab that now composes Sticking Up For Children's new splash homepage.

In May, too, we gained the important, new support of Dr. Nicolas Bazan, head of the Department of Opthamalogy in Louisiana State University’s Medical Center and the patent-holding discoverer of many breakthroughs in neuroscience. We received ongoing support from Sticking Up For Children’s longtime friends Katrina Frey of Frey Vineyards and Kavanaugh Farr of Strip-Ease of New Orleans.

Here's Dr. Bazan in his LSU office with a poster of the "Little Music Maker" painting by another great friend, Isabelle Jacopin of France and New Orleans. Isabelle has donated to SUFC the use of her painting for this poster, one of our gifts to contributors to our Campaign 2017.

The "Little Music-Maker", one of many vividly sympathetic paintings by Isabelle, for SUFC. As Picasso said about Matisse, Isabelle has the sun in her.

There are great accomplishments ahead for SUFC and our partners!