Meet Community Partner Ike Anderson of the Music Resource Center
Ike Anderson is the Membership and Community Coordinator at The Music Resource Center, a Perkins Fellows community partner. I met with Ike at MRC in December. He gave me a tour of the professional studios, rehearsal rooms, sound booth, and mixing studio that spreads underneath the old Mt Zion church on Ridge Street. Like so many other folks, I had no idea that this creative space existed, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the students who fill it every afternoon after school. Here’s what Ike and I talked about! –MD
Volunteer with and donate to the MRC.
How did this organization start? In your own words, what is this organization’s purpose?
MRC was started in June 1992 by John Hornsby, the brother of Bruce Hornsby, and Ivan Orr. The original home of the Music Resource Center was a practice space for the Dave Matthews Band located above Trax, a popular local music venue at the time. In 2004, the band was instrumental in providing the current home of the MRC in the historical site of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church on 105 Ridge St. in downtown Charlottesville.
The vision of MRC is vibrant teens, vibrant community. The idea is to provide the opportunity for our youth to discover talents that they may or may not know they have, or to fine tune the ones they want to get better at through peer education and peer collaboration. We offer individual music lessons through our volunteer teachers as well, but a lot of the learning happens by getting artists in the same space to work together.
I remember my own first day at MRC. I was in the 7th grade and I had just heard about it that day at Buford Middle school and I went without my parents knowing. I walked up the stairs and with each step I could hear more and more music all playing at once. It sounded like chaos; everybody was talking loud to each other, popping in and out of doors. I remember standing there and looking around and thinking this is so cool. I had no idea that kids my age could play guitar or rap or go hard on the drums– I thought that was just stuff adults did. I was so impressed with the level of professionalism too–they spoke in a language that I didn’t understand yet about practicing and recording, but I wanted to. I found myself in a DJ booth that day and it was one of the greatest days of my life. Staff told me my first day was free and then I had to come back with a permission slip and $5. I was in trouble when I got home because I was late; I was supposed to be at the Boy’s and Girl’s club but had gone to MRC on a whim, and I just kept going back after that.
How did you get drawn to this specific work?
I grew up in the program and it was one of the better things about my childhood here. I was able to see the fruits of my labor through the music I produced, and now I get to see the growth of each member as they spend time here and develop as a musician. We’ve seen over and over again how this space positively affects the lives of the people who come through here and it gives me a huge sense of fulfillment. As the community coordinator I sit at the front desk everyday and I get to see the impact that we’re making, and I think that’s really rare.
Where is the organization experiencing need? Where is it experiencing abundance?
Just like every group in town, we are really wanting to get our attendance levels back up to what they were pre-Covid. We’re finally almost back to where we were with numbers and I really hope that continues to be the case.
The abundance has been the fruitfulness of the music created here. Like minded kids just find each other at the MRC and before you know it these kids will form a band. We’ve got several bands right now: Weird (pronounced weird) is a trio that does a lot of heavy classics like Hendrix and Nirvana. The Destructors are a trio of 6th and 7th grade girls that are completely bad-ass and full goth, they do a lot of punk songs. We have a quarterly performance called Live at 5 where students can perform and it’s really great to see what they’ve accrued over a quarter. The kids also book their own gigs too. The staff here are all working artists as well, producers and musicians, and they’ll collaborate. Another one of our groups, the Band with No Name, just recently opened for New Boss over at Hogwaller and it was fantastic. We also have a dance team that I teach called Swerve that has gone on to compete with the Ecstacy dance crew.
Photo by Eze Amos, from C-Ville Weekly
What are you most excited for in the coming year?
I’m most excited to continue the community building I’ve been pursuing. My personal goal is to make MRC a more integral part of the community among the youth, and to make connections with other youth programs who haven’t made it to us yet. I go out to a lot of different schools and programs to talk about MRC but it doesn’t necessarily have the same effect as the power of this building where kids see all sorts of professional equipment that is at their disposal.
What has been MRC’s relationship with the Perkins Fellows? What insights do you have on service learning?
I think it’s so great. Fifi (Fionette King) is our first Perkins Fellow volunteer. She always comes in with fantastic energy wanting to learn about everything that goes on in the space, about everybody who comes in the door. She boosts the kids’ confidence by showing interest and encouragement, and we always need more volunteers to do a bunch of different things: teaching music lessons, making promotional materials for social media, administrative tasks, helping with outreach. Every bit of it counts.
Meet Community Partner Ocean Aiello of The Haven
Ocean Aiello is Community Engagement Manager at the Haven, a Perkins Fellows community partner. I met with Ocean over coffee in late October. Here’s what we talked about! –MD
Be sure to sign up for the Haven’s email newsletter, volunteer with them, and donate.
How did this organization start? In your own words, what is this organization’s purpose?
In the 70s and 80s there was a rise in people experiencing homelessness for a variety of reasons, including the eradication of social safety nets, higher numbers of veterans, etc. In Charlottesville, several groups came together to address food insecurity and housing in the community, including business owners and librarians. Librarians were especially aware of these issues because the central branch of the public library was becoming the de facto day shelter in town, as is commonly the case across the country; the public library is often the only place in a community where one is allowed to use the bathroom and get a drink of water while mostly free of harassment and without having to purchase something. The library, however, is not well equipped to address someone in a housing crisis. During this time, Tom Shadyac, a UVA Alum and Hollywood director (Liar Liar, Ace Ventura) was in Crozet filming Evan Almighty and got connected with the living wage movement in Charlottesville. After a near death experience he began to give money to address homelessness and extreme poverty in the area, purchasing First Christian Church on Market Street to use as a day shelter; the property was sitting empty after the congregation moved out of town. This was right around the same time that Dave Matthews purchased the Zion Baptist Church on Ridge Street to become the Music Resource Center…
After several years of renovation, the doors of the day shelter opened in 2010. The day shelter is open every day of the year from 7am to 5pm. Originally intended to be an overnight shelter as well, we were only given a permit to have a day shelter after pushback from the community. We’re what is known as a low barrier shelter. Low barrier means that we don’t have to screen people upon entry for alcohol or drug use, we don’t require photo ID, and we don’t require people to prove that they’re unhoused. There are rules for being in the space, of course, but I think being low barrier helps us to meet people where they are. For example, as a low barrier shelter we let people sleep during the day. Insomnia is endemic to people experiencing homelessness– you might be up all night moving to protect yourself, your belongings or to stay warm. The forbidding of people to sleep in a day shelter is often rooted in a prejudice that unhoused people are lazy and don’t work, while really the vast majority do have jobs and work.
So we opened the day shelter in 2010. The goal is to offer people a safe space and respite from the elements, helping them meet their basic needs while they’re working to get housing. We have showers, hygiene products, laundry facilities and detergent, computers, phones, mail service, and basic medicines. We serve breakfast every day of the year at 7:30AM and lunch on Fridays. We also have bin storage. There are a total of around 70 bins now where people can store their things in waterproof containers.
It’s important to remember that every person who comes through our doors is different. The only thing that connects them is a need for safe and stable housing. So some folks might need food, while others might need to get their photo ID in order to apply for benefits, a job, or an apartment. We have a whole range of programs just around photo IDs, including volunteer teams that drive people to the DMV and meet with folks about how to get their photo ID, which might involve applying for a birth certificate or filling out forms. That’s where our housing programs come in.
Our housing programs range from preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place to more involved housing programs intended to support individuals who have either experienced chronic homelessness (only a small percentage of the overall population, those who have lived homeless for a year or more or repeatedly over the course of their lifetime) or are under the age of 30 and have interacted with the foster care system. Assistance might look like helping folks pay back owed rent or security deposits, finding more affordable places for people to live, assisting folks in navigating housing applications when they have a felony (with a felony you can legally be barred from apply to every landlord in town!), etc. More involved housing programs include rental subsidies and case management services for folks who have been homeless for the longest amount of time, which is about 10-20% of the overall homeless population. We also work with people 18-30 who have engaged with the foster care system, as the correlation between long term homelessness and the foster care system is huge. Just in the last 2 weeks these programs have housed 3 people! A lot of people are surprised about these programs because the day shelter is more public facing.
There is potential for a study paid for by the city to assess the feasibility of having an overnight, low barrier, year round shelter at the Haven. There’s a lot more emphasis on this, especially in the wake of the Market Street Park encampment. But shelter is not housing–it’s not permanent–so if we invest a lot of money in a shelter, we have to be able to invest the same, if not more, in affordable housing.
How did you get drawn to this specific work?
I studied communications and advocacy at JMU, then was a classroom support in schools in AmeriCorps after college. After that I worked as the hospice volunteer coordinator at Bon Secours in Richmond. Hospice is radical and holistic and I learned a lot about sitting with human suffering. I worked with volunteers in the community–the goal is to have people at home instead of in the hospital and to empower them and their caregivers; the goal is to make the death one of dignity and as little pain as possible. If I see a through line between that job and this one, it’s that they both understand home as a place of care. One thing I heard over and over in that job is “that’s SO hard! I can’t imagine how hard it is to work with death all around!” And it’s true, it was difficult–but also I learned how death is natural and began to accept that. Homelessness, on the other hand, is not natural–even though many people experience it and are resilient within it, it’s not something we should be content with, and that’s a big separation between that job and this one. Many people who land on our doorsteps didn’t just run out of money, they ran out of relationships, they ran out of social safety nets,or these weren’t ever there to begin with. This pushes back against the stereotype that it’s the individual’s fault when they are unhoused. There’s this dehumanization of unhoused people, because you’re implicated if you acknowledge them. There’s a similar dehumanization of people who are dying, because you have to face your own mortality when you see them as human. So the job at Bon Secours prepped me to be Community Engagement Manager at the Haven where I organize the volunteers and have planned major funding events and donation drives.
What gives you hope?
We have a new director, Anna Mendez, which has been really great. We recently had an educational event about Housing First, the philosophy that informs all of what we do at The Haven. About 150 people attended and learned about our success in the community and also the challenges we’re facing. I’m really excited about bringing more people into the fold of our work. I want to find people who have questions or who feel hopeless about the issue of homelessness and show them what’s already happening here at the Haven. I’m hopeful about being more intentional with narrative this year.
What has been the Haven’s relationship with the Perkins fellows and Theological Horizons? Do you have any insights or opinions on service learning?
We’ve had several Perkins Fellows become volunteers with us over the years, and I think that’s really the best thing to do–attend a training and volunteer regularly, once or twice a month. It’s tough when folks come in from UVA and want to volunteer just for a semester. When you think about it, that’s only about 3 months, which is a tiny drop in the bucket. I want to encourage UVA students to think about how projects and initiatives they start will continue after they’re gone. You have big ideas, but what is it rooted in? Do you actually see a need for x project? Has this need been determined by the people who will be impacted? Or are you trying to put something on your resume? Sometimes when students have a certain volunteer hour requirement or a very specific project in mind it can create more work for us at the shelter to accommodate that need. Something that might be helpful is considering how the volunteer experience could be transferable to the next group of people. Our volunteers attend a training session, but there’s only so much you can do in an hour and a half. It would be great to have an overview of the experience and best practices for people as they come on board.