Organization of the Month: TKA Foundation

"Spring of the Artful Renaissance" Video Promo from tkafoundation on Vimeo.

 

"At TKAF, our mission is simple; to help children believe that – to love art isn’t shameful, to love art isn’t weird, to love art isn’t to be stupid, and to love art is to be unique!"

The TKAFoundation or (Tomorrow’s Kaleidoscope of Artists) is a huge supporter of the arts and embarks on contributing back to charities that encourage arts education and an eco-friendly lifestyle.

The TKAFoundation (Tomorrow’s Kaleidoscope of Artists Foundation) is the brainchild of filmmaker Sam Kessie, born in London to Ghanaian parents who later raised her in Ghana where she developed her love for storytelling and then later filmmaking as a way to cross-global boundaries. TKAFoundation was created to support the global arts community by fundraising & contributing to charities that encourage arts education.

TKAFoundation’s 2011 charity of choice is AKOSIA, a non-profit organization that develops and facilitates creative projects for underprivileged children and women all over the world. 

For the past two summers, (2009/2010), the AKOSIA team has been in Accra, Ghana working with the students from the Street Academy – a school that provides free education to children aged 6-18, as well as uniforms, books, and a decent meal each day for Ghana’s abandoned and homeless youth in Accra. During the summer, the school is shut down and so these street kids find themselves back on the streets peddling until school resumes.

The aim of the summer month long filmmaking program is to provide 45 children from the Street Academy a creative filmmaking journey bringing storytelling to life by having the kids write, create, direct and produce their own two short films. The aim is to let the children produce the films as independently as possible, providing them with creative tools and technical skills where necessary. This way, we hope that the children will get the chance to see themselves in a different light and that this will inspire them to become more confident in their creative abilities. At the end of the summer, a mini film festival will be held in order to bring the community together, help impact the less fortunate and less encouraged through something as magical as art.

The TKAFoundation for the 2011 summer project will join the cause to provide an engaging and safe environment where underprivileged children’s natural abilities can be expressed and nurtured, while providing a way out of poverty with useful skills in an ever growing African Film Industry that has rebuilt itself from the ground up with local skills & funding to create an internationally recognized multi-million to billion dollar industry within the last decade.

TKAF has had a couple of fundraiser events to help a team of eight volunteers, all of different backgrounds and walks of life, go to Ghana this summer to provide this arts program for its third consecutive year.  We are extremely excited about this opportunity with the kids and joining AKOSIA's philosophy and making the summer dreams of these kids come true.

Here is a video of the last fundraiser we had to support our mission in NYC:

http://vimeo.com/24083987

We are still a bit away from our goal and so we are planning one last small get together for a one-day informational session & 10-part short film series, with films (10 mins or less) from the team members going to Ghana, as well as two past shorts from the kids of the Street Academy. The event will be sometime late June or early July, so stay tuned for more information on that.

We also have a couple links to fundraising site for online donations.

http://ulu.ly/hg1Ssa

http://tkafoundation.org/sponsorsdonors/

Words can’t even begin to say how grateful we are to everyone who has helped us by supporting our commitment to AKOSIA.  AKOSIA, TKAF and the Street Academy kids say a giant THANK YOU.