FLY!
a new initiative that uses the joy and power of drumming as a means to engage with a wide range of vulnerable populations and community-based human service providers across the United States. FLY! is collaborative, interactive, imaginative, emergent, and joyful.
Using drum as a point of departure FLY! has five critical goals:
Empowering people marginalized by historic social and economic forces by giving them direct, sustained access to accomplished, professional artists through collaboration on creative projects. FLY! facilitates ongoing, personal collaboration between innovative artists and people from all kinds of backgrounds
Connecting with people in a variety of settings including food pantries, homeless shelters, supportive housing sites, and youth service centers
Delivering ongoing programming not only in drumming, music, and the arts, but to develop life skills—including writing skills, critical thinking, decision-making, and other mentoring supports that will open new opportunities and connections for participants
Establishing and supporting a new network of small to mid-sized human service providers in eleven cities across the US by 2025
Creating an ongoing system through which visiting artists-in-residence will identify, train, and support local community members at each site, enabling them to develop resident-led activities as the project progresses.
THE DRUM possesses a uniquely powerful ability to generate a sense of group belonging and to connect people to the heartbeat, and to the rhythms of the universe. Drumming has been employed since time immemorial for communicating, heightening unity and group focus, raising spirits, and creating joyful community.
In over 30 years of leading drumming workshops, drummer/composer and Continuum Artistic Director, Andrew Drury, has developed a model of community work that is exciting, inspiring, and therapeutic for people in an extraordinarily wide range of settings.
Given the enormous and growing need to support vulnerable youth and families—particularly as traditional human service providers struggle to maintain consistent and positive connections with the communities they seek to support—FLY! has been conceived as an impactful and cost-effective method to create human connections, and to leverage these connections in ways that improve conditions in communities.
Continuum has already conducted FLY! pilot activities in partnership with the Low Income Housing Institute in Seattle, Stay Strange, a San Diego-based grassroots arts organization, the Urban Voices Project on Skid Row in Los Angeles, and in Nashua, New Hampshire at the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. 2023 will see us revisit these sites and an additional one in Brooklyn in FLY!’s first phase of implementation. By 2025 we plan to be operating in eleven cities around the US.
This video contains footage from two of the FLY! sites in addition to others where Continuum and CCA Artistic Director Andrew Drury have worked over the years, conducted with both youth and adults.
If you would like to know more about FLY! please contact us!