This Smart Art of Trash Community Clean-up & Recycle Challenge is an initiative of the Literacy Project International focusing on getting individuals, schools, churches, neighborhood associations and civic organizations to participate in cleaning neighborhoods in the districts around the schools that participate in Literacy Project International's Whose Magazine? A Youth Publication program.

 

This New Orleans based program stems from the program founder Madera E. Rogers directed in public schools in Colorado from 1998 to 2010 where students interviewed Tiger Woods, Morgan Freeman, and Miss America, among other personalities, wrote of their first-ever visit to a theatrical stage show, and traveled to Ground Zero in New York to document the 9/11 tragedy through words and photographs. Partners at the time included numerous school districts and businesses such as Denver Film Society to Radio Disney. 

 

The project director has re-established Whose Magazine? A Youth Publication as an extra-curricular program in New Orleans, where it has already begun to engage children from schools in the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly in the art of modern journalism with a focus on examining and highlighting the cultural and environmental issues within their own communities. The mission of the Smart Art of Trash Community Clean-up & Recycle Challenge is to engage neighborhoods in their own environmental stewardship.

​

​

​

While the organization works to address cultural, environmental, and educational literacy, the Smart Art of Trash project is designed specifically to address the problem of trash pollution, especially in Gentilly and New Orleans East.

​

​

 

In the past 12 months, the Literacy Project International has begun partnering with schools to increase student literacy through the Whose Magazine? A Youth Publication project. Selected students from each school participate in workshops to learn and practice research, writing, editing/analysis, photography, and other aspects of journalism with the goal of online and print publication.

In June, Whose Magazine? received a grant from Youth Service America (YSA) Hilton Tapestry Collection for Spark The Arts. 

It has also gained local in-kind support from the Hawthorne Agency, WBOK Radio, Balthazar Electriks, Gentilly Mail Copy Center, and Wesley Barrow Stadium.

 

 

 

Affected populations:

The trash pollution problem around our partner schools in Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward affects a populations with the limited economic resources to combat illegal dumping and littering on their own:

• Gentilly Woods (Mary D. Coghill Charter School) = $48,333

• Lower 9th Ward (Light City Christian Academy) = $30,035

• Milneburg (Adinkra Nola) = $45,791

 

​

 

Formal and informal relationships with orgs trying to meet the same need:

Whose Magazine? is partnered with the following (and intends to increase its partnerships throughout the year):

• Xavier University School of Mass Communications

• Mary D. Coghill Charter School

• Adinkra Nola

• City Light Christian Academy

​