Bring City Love to your School for a transformative Assembly, workshop or residency
Family Concerts and School Fundraisers
Teacher Professional Development
Research, Articles and Resources for Educators
"Run, don't walk to bring City Love to your school! Their melodious presentation will inspire and entertain audiences of all ages. They truly are masterful in bringing a compelling message of hope, love and social justice! Wheeler students want them back!" -Princess Sirleaf Bomba, Director of Unity and Diversity at The Wheeler School
Never too young for Justice - Virtual Assembly
An engaging, developmentally appropriate assembly (also available virtually) to build community across our differences, talk about race, hope, equity, and belonging for preschool-4th grade students. (though plenty of schools have had us share this with preschool-6th)
With this highly participatory performance we use a collection of our children's songs to engage our youngest learners to celebrate the ways in which we are all both similar and different. We name the fact that some of the differences between us carry very different weights, and people in our world and our country have not always been - and still are not always - treated fairly based on differences like the color of our skin, our gender, religion, who we love, and more. Students share out what it looks like to be an upstander, and we discuss how even if many grownups and kids in our country are still learning how to be kind, safe and fair to all people, we can set an example for the world in our classrooms.
Our performance helps to initiate or sustain developmentally appropriate conversations and shared dialogue in early childhood classrooms that will help our students make sense of the world they see around them and feel empowered to be the change the world needs. When you book an assembly with us, the pricing will include complimentary hard copies of our children’s album World of Love for your students to bring home or free downloads so that your school community can continue to use our songs to build dialogue and harmonize all the voices in the room around values of diversity, equity and justice in your classroom. (30-45 minutes, Maximum of 500 participants) See Our Pricing
A year of city love (Virtual Residency for K-6)
Part PD for teachers, part workshop for students - Longitudinal relationships with students and teachers in three touchstone grades with multiple visits a year.
We can work with your institution to craft a residency that will allow us to work longitudinally with both students and teachers at your school. Typical residencies have involved 3 visits each year focusing on 3 grades spanning the arc or learning at a school, such as Kindergarten, 2nd and 5th or 1st, 3rd and 6th grades. Part professional development, part workshop, part deep dive, part performance, we will work with your students and teachers to build towards the goals of their choice around identity, equity, diversity, justice, inclusion and/or action with the option of a culminating all school assembly and/or family concert where students will share out original songs they will have created around the values of celebrating differences, understanding our identities, standing up for each other, working towards fairness, self-love, and love for the community. A City Love residency is a chance to open meaningful, challenging conversations, model dialogue, build shared language and narratives, and for students to construct their own musical distillations of their learning with support from life-long creators, educators and advocates. See Our Pricing.
Virtual Family concerts and school fundraisers:
Deepening the work and broadening impact by engaging with the whole school community.
We are exited to partner with your school or organization to offer family concerts as community gatherings or fundraisers. A family concert using our songs is a meaningful chance to give entire families a deep shared experience, shared language, narratives and theme songs to open discussions about race, celebrating our differences, self-love, fairness, caring and sharing. We have found that this builds cohesive community around positive change, inclusion, equity and justice among school families. We also partner with schools and organizations at family events to sell our CDs on a sliding scale of $5-20 with fifty percent of proceeds going to support your school or organization’s work around accessibility and/or anti-oppression professional development opportunities. Contact us to discuss how we can best partner with you for your family event. See Our Pricing.
Virtual Professional Development for Elementary Educators
City Love shares professional development workshops for educators at conferences, schools, colleges of education, and can be a meaningful support to a school in thinking about how to integrate developmentally appropriate work around identity, diversity, equity, justice and action into your curriculum maps, classroom culture and school community. Contact us to discuss your school’s goals and how we can help you further this important work at your institution. See Our Pricing.
Research, Articles and Resources for Educators:
Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark, Doll Study. (1947) Read the original full document here.
Seven Myths of Race and the Young Child by Lawrence A. Hirshfeld
Children, Race and Racism: How Race Awareness Develops by Louise Derman-Sparks
Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools by Dr. Howard Stevenson
Why Making Music Matters by Dennie Wolf, WolfBrown and Carnegie Hall
Early Childhood Identity Development by Debbie LeeKeenan
Early Childhood Educator Implicit Bias and Preschool Expulsions by Dr. Walter Gilliam et al
Teaching Tolerance ( www.tolerance.org) Anti-Bias Framework and Social Justice Standards
Children’s Community School (Philadelphia) - Wonderful Child Development Research Overview Infographic: They’re Not Too Young to Talk About Race
NPR and Sesame Workshop: The Things Parents Don’t Talk About with Their Kids… but Should
Sesame Workshop Report: Identity Matters (Study of 6,000 families)
Wonderful list of books for building equitable, inclusive community: We need diverse books
7 Things to Do When Your Kid Points Out Someone’s Differences by Rachel Garlinghouse.
Talking With Children About Racism, Police Brutality and Protests, by Laura Markham.
6 Things White Parents Can Do to Raise Racially Conscious Children, by Bree Ervin
Talking to Children After Racial Incidents: By Dr. Howard Stevenson.
Childhood Experiences and Intergroup Biases among Children by Allison L. Skinner (Northwestern Univeresity) and Andrew N. Meltzoff (University of Washington)
Racial Awareness and Bias Begin Early: Developmental Entry Points, Challenges, and a Call to Action by Sandra R. Waxman, Northwestern University Dept. of Psychology
Without Context, Social Emotional Learning Can Backfire - Dr. Dena Simmons