Aditi Joshi

Shifting Rhythms is a mobile education program that introduces technology, entrepreneurship, and the arts to youth ages 12-18 in Coahoma County, Mississippi. The project began in the fall of 2014 with engagement with stakeholders in Coahoma County. Mississippi ranks 43rd for educational achievement in the country and many youth and community leaders expressed concern over future opportunities for those living in the county. We heard teachers say that the youth in the county suffered from a “lack of exposure”, putting them on a different playing field as their counterparts in other states. As such, we found it important to bring hands-on skills and learning opportunities to youth, supplementing their formal education. As Coahoma is a rural county, and those in smaller towns do not have the access to resources in the city, we found it important that the space was mobile, so it could reach several points in the county.

Coahoma County is where Blues music was born but also has a legacy of slavery that can still be seen in the built environment today. We wanted to bring the heritage of Blues music back into the community and we did this through a unique, modern guitar making curricula. This not only allows youth to learn new skills, but also do so in the context of their own community’s history and experiences.

In order to deliver the curricula, we decided to partner with exciting after school programs. This would allow longevity as we would be connecting with the same youth week after week. It also was important to work within existing frameworks to gain trust in the community, so having these partnerships allowed us to demonstrate that we cared about what the community was already doing and wanted to add to that rather than imposing our own ideas and curricula.

ENGAGEMENTS

co-designing and prototyping with stakeholders

Since working with the local community was important, we created several engagement tools and activities to do with youth to prototype and co-design the program with us. We worked with youth to come up with branding for the program, which led us to our name, colors, and logo. We also did several prototypes before landing on the curricula around guitar making. In the spring of 2018 a pilot was completed, helping us understand the feasibility of the program and gaining more local support through hiring local teachers as our pilot leaders.

BUSINESS MODEL

designing a sustainable economic infrastructure

This program had to be self-sustaining, so we developed and prototyped a business model that focused on youth selling products that they made during the course of the program, where a portion of that profit would go to them and the rest would go into sustaining the bus. During our 2018 pilot we also worked to testing this business model.

In order to gain funding for this pilot, we also worked on several grant applications. Through the course of the semester, we received over $52,000 in funding, from both national organizations like the Ford Foundation as well as local organizations in Mississippi. This money helped us buy a trailer as well as two part time staff members for our pilot. Hopefully this will take the project to the next level and eventually become an entirely community run and financial stable program embedded within Coahoma County.

We also put together a video to show our project to stakeholders and potential funders, which you can view here: