It’s a familiar story, at least as old as I am: across America’s public schools, arts education programs have been slashed as a cost saving measure, leaving private systems and non-profits to fill in the gaps. In my estimation, one non-profit happens to be filling in that gap rather well, doing so in a way that benefits students, teachers, schools, and the private sector all at the same time.
This program is called, quite simply, the Lennon Bus; think of it as a highly technical realization of Partridge Family values: essentially a recording studio on wheels (though these days, it’s much more than that), the Lennon Bus tours the country, making appearances in school districts and after-school programs—many of them severely impoverished.
More than an arts/engineering intensive, the Lennon Bus aims to teach children the importance of team work, focus, discipline, and goal-based learning—and they do all of this by means of a technologically up-to-date multimedia facility. The Lennon Bus also seeks to demonstrate just how valuable such student programs can be to school administrators; having shown off its wares, the Lennon Bus often proceeds to facilitate the donation of the necessary equipment to set up such a facility within the boundaries of a school (indeed, partnering with their sponsors, the Lennon Bus donated over $30,000 worth of gear to schools over the 2014-2015 school year).
Why are we highlighting this within the online pages of Forbes.com, you might ask? Because this program would never enjoy its currently wide scope without the partnership of major brands and corporations; partnering with the Lennon Bus allows a brands such as Apple or Avid to tap into greater marketplaces, giving them a vital presence within a school system often stuck on antiquated operating systems and hardware facilities.
In other words, not only does the program inspire students to learn, teachers to teach, and administrators to arm themselves with valuable equipment, it promotes awareness of particular brands, effectively hooking entirely new generations of consumers onto their products. Yes, there is a capitalistic (and perhaps opportunistic) undercurrent to program, but without the support of these companies (ranging from Apple to Montblanc), the program wouldn’t work as well as it does.
Indeed, it works rather well. Beginning its trek through America in 1998, the Lennon Bus originally started as an outgrowth of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest that begun a year prior. “Originally I had thought that this was just going to be a spring promotion,” Executive Director Brian Rothschild told me. But everything changed when the bus made an appearance on Good Morning America. Along with Wyclef Jean and Joan Osborne, Brian had the last minute idea to feature students from New York City public schools on the program. Synergy followed: during the course of the taping, Jean and Osborne helped the students write an original song, revealing “it in the last five minutes of the show,” Brian told me.
A fantastic response from everyone from teachers to mayors followed; it seemed quite a few people wanted a piece of the bus. Said Rothschild, “It was at that point that we realized that we had something that really touched people,” and in very short order, the bus gained traction, growing into a technological powerhouse traveling from state to state, with a special focus on impoverished communities.
“I would say certainly at least fifty or sixty percent of the stops we’re making are in communities that are struggling,” said Brian, who has called his layovers in such areas “a significant commitment.”
With the arrival of the Lennon Bus, Rothschild hopes to address the strange digital divide impoverished children often find themselves straddling: a student might have access to a relatively advanced smartphone off school grounds, but once they arrive at school, students “don’t have access,” Brian told me. “They don’t have the bandwidth on campus. They’re somewhat disconnected.”
As such, the children tend “to know a lot about working with digital media,” said Rothschild, but they don’t necessarily understand how this digital knowledge just might benefit their professional lives: “They don’t realize the career paths that are connected to a lot of the entertainment orientated things they’re interested in,” Brian told me.
This is reflected in the evolution of the Lennon Bus’s program. In its early days, students of the Lennon Bus were encouraged to write and record music during day- or week-long intensives; now the scope is far more vast, as the bus hopes to educate students in a wide array of behind-the-scene digital fields, whether it be pro audio, “the video side, motion graphics, animation, [or] music,” as Brian told me.
While the program itself does not replace oft-cut public school arts programs, it has historically inspired administrators to include better arts programs within their own walls. Brian related a story in which the superintendent of a district in Clinton, Mississippi saw “how students were interacting, and how enthusiastic they were about the experience, and [then] made the decision right then and there to find and allocate the funding for that music lab.”
Yes, this is an isolated example, but according to Brian, “It’s happened dozens of times.”
“It’s easy to marginalize something if it’s just on a piece paper,” Rothschild told me. “You take a pen and you cross it out and it’s not in the program anymore.” However, “it’s a lot harder when you have an event or a series of a events that actually are engaging your community.”
Brian sees this as quite important to the overall health of education, as there is evidence to suggest that arts education is “linked to almost everything that we as a nation say we want and demand for our schools—academic achievement, social and emotional development, civic engagement, and equitable opportunity,” as an article on Edutopia.com pointed out.
Brian framed it in terms a Forbes.com reader could understand: arts education programs seem “to actually be something that in the long run can save communities money.”
This is especially crucial because, as Rothschild notes, “For the lion’s share of the students that we’re seeing, music is not going to be their life’s calling.” Rather, the bus focuses on “the benefits for students that have a broad range of interests.”
“We’re there to inspire the next generation of leaders,” Brian said. “Hopefully that next generation is going to have more sensitivity to working together with people from different backgrounds.”
Again, it is important to note that none of this would be possible if brands such as Apple, Avid Techology, Gibson, Epiphone, Montblanc, SESAC, Dell, Yamaha, Adobe, and Audio-Technica (to name a few) didn’t get involved, showing off their products on the bus, and then making their own separate appearances within related arts programs. It is not unreasonable to assume that after working with Avid or Apple, these students might label these companies as go-to entities if they seek to enter the fields of video, audio, or content production in their professional lives.
Commenting on this paradigm—the marketing of product to schools and students across the company—Brian said, “that’s a given, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” He conceded that “some companies want the marketing value, but if they didn’t care about the core work of what the bus does, then they probably wouldn’t get involved.” According to Brian, people in the “driver seat of those companies believe that it’s the right thing to do.”
Still, the Lennon Bus is “clearly showing products from our sponsor/manufacturers,” said Rothschild. The hope is that “when the time is right, people are going to want to buy [these products] for themselves, for their school districts, for their community centers,” said Brian. “That’s definitely a part of it, and that’s how we’ve kept the bus alive.”
Ultimately though, what the non-profit and its sponsoring brands hope to do together is carry John Lennon’s message to as many people as possible: “to create a more peaceful world.”
Said Brian, “We’re not heavy handed about it, but to hear the story of John—and John and Yoko’s—work is inspiring for most everyone who gets on board the bus, and not everyone knows about that. For our young people especially, they don’t hear enough about peace…if we don’t talk to [our kids] about peace, how can we ever expect them to get it?”
A laudatory message to be sure. Perhaps this effective cooperation between the profit and the non-profit sector is a good place to start.
