HipHOP Benefit Provides Proceeds to Boston’s Homeless

“This is a song for the homeless,” sang Okechukwu Iweala ’06 to kick off the events at Kirkland’s Junior Common Room last Friday night. An audience of roughly 75 members of the Harvard community gathered to hear the sound of ten unique spoken word and rap artists perform at the “HipHOP” fundraiser.

“Hip” refers to the night’s musical style of choice (hip-hop), while the “HOP” stands for the Housing Opportunity Program, the organization for which the benefit was held, and to which all the night’s proceeds went.

For the $3 admission ticket, guests were treated to two hours of performance art delivered by Harvard students and professional artists as well as refreshments and automatic entry into a raffle for a DVD player. All of the artists, including those who traveled from outside of the Cambridge area, provided their services free of charge to raise money and awareness for HOP.

Grace Chou ’06, director of HOP, saw this event as an opportunity to bring awareness to the campus about the organization, which provides interest-free loans to members of the greater Boston area in danger of being evicted from their homes or apartments.

Spoken-word and rap is a new angle for HOP fundraisers in their 14-year history, which usually occur once per semester. “We usually try to pick a fun and interesting theme for our fundraisers,” Chou says, “and once people find out about the HOP [in this way] they are usually very excited.”

The HOP was started in 1990 by a handful of Harvard professors who sought to “solve the problem of homelessness structurally,” Chou says, because while so many programs focus strictly on fighting homelessness with shelters, programs to help people in danger of becoming homeless in the first place are few and far between.

HOP aims to prevent homelessness by providing aid in the form of generous loans to “people in tough financial circumstances, with no access to loans from banks, and [who] have bad credit history,” says Chou. In addition to offering loans worth one or two months’ rent to people in danger of eviction, according to Chou, HOP also aids those already homeless to get back on their feet by “provid[ing] money to people in homeless shelters for help with housing.”

Apparently the efforts have worked thus far, as these twice-annual benefits continue to thrive, and many organizations such as Project Help and Lend a Helping Hand often collaborate with the Housing Opportunity Program’s efforts to help truncate the evictions of, according to Chou, “50,000 people per year in the greater Boston area.”

POET POTPOURRI

Performing at the event was a wide variety of very talented and eclectic poets, singers and rappers from the Harvard campus and the Cambridge area. Some of the professionals from outside of Harvard included witty spoken word artist Ryk McIntyre, who spoke about the indignity of the phrase “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.” McIntyre finished his tirade on the popular consolation with the words, “the ‘makes me stronger’ part is up to me,” much to the audience’s delight.

After McIntyre performed, Crystal Johnson, a published poet from the Black Out Arts Collective, took the stage, half-singing, half-reading two poems with such striking, dramatic lines as, “are we Feng Shui or Sinn Fein?” and “I don’t ever want to be Barbie, and brother you can never be Ken.” An obvious crowd favorite, Johnson, a Cambridge grade school teacher by day, nonchalantly shrugged off the effort it took for her to come out and perform gratis, saying, “I like to do stuff for community efforts.” Johnson is one of a group of poets published in the recently released book entitled Soul Sister’s Diary.

The first rapper to perform at the event was Okechukwu, whose reflections on modern social issues were reminiscent of contemporary rappers Kanye West and Nas. With his powerful vocalizations and rhythmic rocking, Oke took a strong stab at the state of today’s society when he asked, “This is a song for the homeless, but do y’all cats really take notice?”

After receiving a raucous applause, Oke, who began his performance with the words, “I take [rapping] serious,” handed the microphone over to Harvard students Mikal N. Floyd-Pruitt ’06 and Rich W.A. Maye ’05.

The team of two young students, obviously very close friends, was a refreshing taste of freestyle rap in a relaxed environment that often felt more like friendly banter between friends than a recital of memorized lyrical poetry. In terms of this relaxed style of performing, Floyd-Pruitt, a.k.a. MC Mikal, described, “We are laid-back and funny when we perform because we are laid-back and funny in general,” and explained that “Entertaining is not just reciting words, it’s also about holding the audiences’ attention and music can do that in many ways.”

Brandon M. Terry ’05, president of the Black Men’s Forum, transformed into a rapper known as “Hollaman” to follow the somewhat comic duo with socially informed rap, targeting issues concerning politics and the status of African-Americans in society with his words. He touched on this theme in one of his more poignant lyrics, “Bush wants to talk about terror / Baltimore’s got 300 murders a year with no Al Qaeda.”

Though the performance was Terry’s first solo—he usually performs with Tha League—he was visibly comfortable and confident, asserting in one song, “I do what I do like I’m on TV and I’m almost famous.”

Terry summed up the importance of Friday night’s event, stating, “Some people tend to run away from problems they think are too large, like homelessness, and retreat into their own lives. I think that we can enjoy our lives at the same time we help others and last night is more proof of that.”

After Terry’s performance, an unassuming young male by the name of Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07 took the stage to deliver what he referred to as a “narrative poem [that] tells of the devastation of a homeless mother and her child, a living poetry that’s allowed to die on the steps of a church in the cold of winter.”

He added, “It’s easy for privileged people to ignore realities like this, even when they’re right in front of you. But art is mightier than apathy.”

Like the other artists, Gould-Wartofsky focused his readings on the topic of homelessness “just like you might write a love poem and get a girl to think of you in a deeper way. You can write a poem about, say, homelessness, and get people to think about that in a deeper way.”

Taking center stage after Wartofsky was the only female Harvard student to perform at the HOP benefit, the glamorous Leyla R. Bravo ’05, who later said, “many times my own family was nearly forced out of our rented apartments and we had to really fight to stay.” In a different twist on the idea of “homelessness,” Bravo explored the feelings of disenfranchisement that immigrants like herself experience. A true poet at heart, Bravo commented, “If one person found solace with my words, that’s already changing the world.”

The final two performers were the published poet known only by the title, “Melissa,” and the newly signed local rapper Sean Dwyer. Melissa gave her thoughtful prose dramatic vivification with hand movements and body language depicting the stories within her stories. Dwyer finished off the night with an energetic delivery of original songs, and offered CDs to the many eager students and poetry buffs in attendance.

Ultimately the event was a success, for in addition to the remarkable display of talent featured at Friday night’s venue, the benefit raised over $300 for HOP. The sum total for this year is less than last semester’s $500 because the ticket price was reduced to $3 from last semester’s $5. Chou, who reassured that “all proceeds go toward the loan fund,” was extremely pleased with Friday night’s outcome, for in the words of performer MC Mikal, “a benefit show is meant to uplift, and HOP is working hard to do that.”

Those interested in learning more about HOP can access their website at http://hcs.harvard.edu/~hop.

After all, as Bravo points out, “Words are only words. Action proves that something really affected you and that you really want to do something about it.”