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.