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September 2023 Little by Little campaign!
until September 22, 2023, at 23:59:59 EDT
Greetings to the Kono Gnaga family of supporters!
We hope this message finds everyone doing well! We have had a busy few months since our last annual school and community festival held this January in Bamako. We were very excited this year to be able to collect feedback and perspectives from students, festival participants, and community members in Mali. We have compiled this into 2 videos - one with English subtitles and one with French subtitles. Please see the links below to find out what everyone thinks! We could not have done this without your help!
As we move into the second half of 2023, this year's school programs will begin in October with the festival to take place in January 2024. We hope this year to continue to work with 4 partner schools as well as to add in the street children to participate as well!
We have 2 other important events coming up this year and we hope that you will be able to participate.
1) Wednesday July 12: GlobalGiving is having a special fundraising day on Wednesday July 12. On this day any larger donations made after 9am Eastern time (so $100 or more) that are donated are eligible for matching grants. We would be grateful for any support through GlobalGiving on this day!
Donations of $100 - $499 USD will be matched at 30%
Donations of $500 - $749 USD will be matched at 40%
Donations of $750 - $1,000 USD will be matched at 50%
2) Sunday August 20: We will be having our annual local fundraiser this year at the Living Arts Collective in Durham, North Carolina! We are excited to be partnering with the Collective Team. It will be a day with a dance workshop taught by our director Solo Sana, as well as great music provided by the local band African Unplugged. You can find more info on our facebook page and our website: www.konogngaga.org
As always thank you for your continued support as these programs could not continue without it....and don't forget to check out the video link below!
Solo Sana, Director
Kono Gnaga Inc.
Links:
Dear Kono Gnaga Friends and Family,
This Sunday, January 22nd (11am Eastern time!) we will be putting on Dou Ba - Our 5th Annual Community Festival in Mali featuring children's performances from FOUR schools. After holding the festival for multiple years in the same neighorhood, we have moved it to the Paradjicoroni neighborhood. The excitement this has brought to the community is palpable with attendancee expected to surpass initial projections, resulting in the need to even move the location of the festival to accomodate a larger crowd!
Of particular importance this year is the addition of a fourth school that is a Koranic school. This is a great addition as it allows us to demonstrate that religion, dance, and music can compliment each other. In addition Solo connected with a group of street children and they will be participating as well. All children that participate in the program will also be receiving school supplies as well as clothes for the most needy. These additions have not only spread our reach to more children and more schools, we are also providing significant income to more artists!
This year the festival will be broadcast on Facebook live via Solo's page (Souleymane Sana) AND on Zoom direct from Mali. The zoom link is below. We hope you will join us!
In addition, through funding from an organization in the US - Artists Against Genocide, we have launched a program to teach 2 months of workshops to the children at the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp in Bamako. Living in very inhumane conditions (on a garbage dump) these weekly workshops have brought joy to these children. We are so grateful for the opportunity to work with this Fulani commuity - see the photo below.
All of this work could not be carried out without your help! We thank each one of you for your contributions and support - every dollar is a tremendous help!
With gratitude,
Solo Sana, Director
Zyck Baggett, Communications and PM
and the Kono Gnaga Board of Directors
Kono Gnaga is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Kono Gnaga 5th Annual Dou Ba Festival
Time: Jan 22, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5830735114?pwd=SDNBcFp0ekczdEovMkcyNkpBdzA3Zz09
Meeting ID: 583 073 5114
Passcode: 2023
Links:
Hi Friends,
We wanted to update you to let you know what is going on with Kono Gnaga as we enter the new school year and gear up for our next season. Solo went to Mali in June and laid the groundwork for the Kono Gnaga artists to start working in our three partner schools. This will be our fifth year of working with schools in Bamako. We anticipate being able to secure funding in order to add a fourth school, this time in a village outside of Bamako so we can make sure our impact goes beyond urban areas. As you may imagine working in the rural areas of Mali is not an easy task, but we are excited at this important initiave! We will update you as we go forward.
Another exciting development is that Solo and the artists will be working with an organization from the US, Artists To End Genocide, and teaching dance to children at a refugee/IDP camp in Bamako. The situations these children live in is very difficult, and we know that the value the dance and music can bring to them will be immeasurable. We are excited to have this opportunity and will share more information as it comes.
In the meantime, please note these upcoming events:
And CHECK OUT this short interview with one of the Kono Gnaga students, Fatoumata, as she talks about what learning the dances means to her! Video Interview
Thank you again for all of your support!!
Solo Sana
Zyck Baggett
and the Kono Gnaga Board of Directors
Greeting Kono Gnaga Supporters,
We have had a great year despite all the challenges we have faced! We were excited to finally be able to move forward with our School Festival at the end of 2020 and have all three schools participate. It was by far our best event yet, with amazing productions put on by the students at the schools. Kono Gnaga artists worked with our three partner schools, L' École Gogo Adam Dicko, L' École Faladie So Coura, and L' École Soundiata Badialan 3. We had over 80 students participate and another 20 artists presenting pieces from the different regions and ethnic groups of Mali. In addition we had over 200 community members in attendance. The event was recorded and aired throughout Mali on 2 local television stations and was a featured event on ORTM’s Terroir program which isdedicated to highlighting the cultural folklore of Mali.
The event was a resounding success with community members and students commenting that learning the traditional dance and music is an important part of education. When Boubacar Keita, 17, from Mansa Soudiata Keita school was asked if he knew the dance he had learned, he said he was not very familiar with it and that "traditional dance and music are important to know and learn because it allows us to keep and know our culture"
As school just began for the 2021-2022 year, the Kono Gnaga artists have begun to work with the students. They will be teaching and rehearsing with them into the new year, with the next Festival planned for January 2022 - we are excited to see what the students present and hope to have an even greater presence by the community.
For more information about our work over the past year please be sure to check out our Annual Newsletter: Kono Gnaga Newsletter 2021
Please also check out our Video footage of the 2020 School Festival: 2020 School Festival
We greatly appreciate your continued support and look forward to even more progress in 2022! As always check our website and social media on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for continued updates.
Wishing you all a happy and healthy 2022,
Zyck Baggett, Project Director
Souleymane Sana, Artistic Director
Greetings Kono Gnaga Supporters!
The first part of 2021 has been an interesting mix of shut downs and "life as normal" here in Mali. As COVID continues to challenge so much of daily life and activities, Solo and his team of artists have been able to continue to offer weekly virtual dance classes direct from Mali as well as virtual workshops to schools in Eastern North Carolina. They have given almost 15 "live from Mali" workshops to elementary schools with children joining from their classrooms as well as connecting in from home. This has been a fantastic opportunity provided with support from Atlantic Dance Theatre in North Carolina and possibly one of the positive outcomes of this pandemic. The students and teachers have been so enthusiastic and the workshops always end with a long Q&A session that allows for questions that range from "what kind of food do you eat" to "do you have Komodo Dragons in Mali?"
Over the past couple of months we have also been very busy reasearching grant opportunities as well as connecting with organizations such as UNESCO and the ICCROM "International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property" to explore potential future partnerships. We are also looking for financial support to use green construction to build our dance and music center - see the photo below of the design using traditional banco (mud) bricks. There are lots of resources and sites urging this, but finding the funding is proving challenging. Please reach out if you have any ideas! As we know the construction of this larger center is further off in our future, we used personal funds to build an initial outdoor space that can be used for workshops, rehearsals, and other events that will be located next to the larger center. We are so excited at the outcome particularly the amazing mural work done by local artist Drissa Konate. There is still a lot of work to be done to make this a fully functioning space, but we are on our way. We hope some of you will consider coming to visit and help us to launch the use of the site!
We also wanted to share the sad news that we unfortunately lost one of our Kono Gnaga artists - Nana Diarra. She performed with Solo's group Sira Kora and participated in our Kono Gnaga events. You can see her in the center of the picture above. She was a young woman that was a fierce dancer and dedicated to traditional dance. She unfortunately passed away due to complications from childbirth which is all too common in places like Mali with substandard health care. We are currently braintstorming ways to honor her as we desperately need to encourage more young women to take up the study of dance.
We have attached a link to our final video/report from the Kono Gnaga school festival. This contains great clips of the students dancing so that you can experience what the festival was like. the link is here: Kono Gnaga's 2020 School Festival. Plans are already in place for a festival again for the 2021-2022 school year to take place in January 2022.
Our plans are ambitious so donations are always welcome! We want to thank each of you for your continued support!
Solo Sana, Zyck Baggett, and the Kono Gnaga Team
Links:
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