The mission of Coffee House Arts Call and Response Project is to foster critical thinking, positive engagement in community, deep listening skills and capacity to make creative leaps. In the spirit of jazz, the project seeks to build students’ ability to engage collaboratively in creating new works and develop their capacity to respond creatively to existing work, ideas in other genres, and their own world. It thereby aims to foster creative thinkers, better prepared to engage innovatively in the world of work (whether in an artistic or other profession) and as citizens and human beings.
In support of this mission, long-term goals include developing the online capacity to connect students with sister schools and project alumni through call and response activities. The project seeks to expand students’ contact with practitioners of a variety of artistic genres, through teaching artists and trips. It aims to enlarge the scope of its year-end event to include more schools and genres, and to further develop its audience. Another long-term aim is to extend its intergenerational call farther and build community bridges, by enabling students to reach out to elderly New Yorkers with their poetry, music and art.