Pine Bluff native, Stanford University alum and emcee Epiphany Morrow, known to most as Big Piph, launches his latest effort in November, with help from fellow musician Sean “Fresh” West, attorney Jean Block and others. The F.A.M. Project will mentor eight 10th-12th graders from Jefferson and Pulaski counties and, encouraging entrepreneurship through a hip-hop lens, ask them to dream up a project that provides “a quantitative benefit to an underserved community in Central Arkansas for their relative age range or younger.” The Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, Remix Ideas, the Arkansas Community Foundation and others gave support to the project, meant to “find, activate and mature” participants.
Then, participants will meet with TFP staff throughout the school year to advance the project. The students receive a $125 stipend for completing the course, and they’re required to present their work in an online session, open to the public. Interest in hip-hop is a helpful prerequisite, though the students need not be musicians themselves. Know a young thinker who might benefit from such a thing? Find more details about the program here, and apply here.