secretprojectrobot

Silent Barn space may go to Educated Little Monsters

Night Mayor at Secret Project Robot
(Night Mayor at Secret Project Robot, photo via buhlexin)

When Silent Barn announced they were closing (and regularly since then), they urged people to donate to Educated Little Monsters (ELM), “a music and arts group serving Bushwick youth whose communities are severely impacted by gentrification. ELM has been running classes and programming out of Silent Barn since 2014 and is now fundraising to launch a new all-ages space with their community partners.”

ELM’s own statement on the situation talks about using the money to find a new space. Here’s an excerpt:

It was never comfortable or easy to build inside the largely white, transplant-run DIY space that is Silent Barn, but against all odds it has become a headquarters for our whole team of mentors, artists, and youth to build and grow together. With the support of our community partners Color Scenes, Bushwick Vendors Market, and Bushwick Street Art—who share leadership with ELM and have always provided resources and income to help stabilize the program—we broke down barriers in Silent Barn, and were finally beginning to feel like it could be home.

So to learn that Silent Barn is shutting down in less than two months, closing its doors on April 30th, is beyond devastating. The disappointment is compounded by the fact that we’ve always had to operate under the looming threat of losing space to gentrification. But we also know that through this setback we will not only survive—we will thrive. ELM was founded in resistance to displacement, but has been kept alive by the resilience of our founder and teaching team—and above all by the resilience of our powerful, unstoppable young people.

It is because of our youth that we are diving directly into a massive fundraiser, beyond the scope of anything we’ve attempted before, to raise $50,000 by May 1st. We are dreaming wildly because we owe it to our youth, and because we will not let this program be without a space—a space that will be ours, that we cannot be pushed out of, with a long-term lease that protects us from the skyrocketing rents of our gentrifying neighborhood. We need to guarantee our youth security in a way that Silent Barn couldn’t, despite their best efforts and intentions. We need a real, sustainable home. And to achieve this, we need to build a base of long term members who sign up to give recurring donations so we can avoid the debilitating cycle of emergency crowdfunding.

With $50,000, we will open a new space for the youth program, one that will also function as an all-ages venue and event space in collaboration with its community partners Color Scenes, Bushwick Street Art, and The Lab Recording Studio.

Read their full statement and learn how to donate HERE, but note the new developments coming out of tonight’s Night Mayor meetings at Silent Barn and Secret Project Robot….

https://twitter.com/noyinzoe/status/978413682421100544

This is obviously preliminary, but promising! Stay tuned for more details as they emerge, and check out a few more tweets recapping tonight’s meeting below:

https://twitter.com/noyinzoe/status/978414464667127808

https://twitter.com/noyinzoe/status/978428721286860800