Coming from an impoverished area of Ferguson, MO, aspiring to pursue a career in music was essential for giving me hope for the future. While creatively motivating, it was not practical enough to persuade my family to use our scarce resources that at times could not cover food to fund my college pursuits. This motivated me in high school to learn artist management and venue booking. I used this knowledge to create an annual benefit concert series with a committee of visual artists and staff to raise over $13,000 in scholarship funding for future seniors at my school. Inspired by the difference I was able to make in the lives of the talented youth in my city with no outlet, I worked to gain admittance into NYU’s recorded music program. My goal is to further my industry knowledge to secure a career as an A&R Representative, learn audio engineering and attend stock trading courses to ultimately create a fund for impoverished students with collegiate level music aspirations. With $1000, I would immediately be able to begin investing portions at a time for this scholarship fund and contributing to it with my own earnings. If I am able to create an opportunity for the youth of Saint Louis through managing that money and working intensely, then I will have been rewarded for all of my efforts.

As an African-American, I have been subject and witness to the atrocities that many of my people must face at a young age. Growing up impoverished in Ferguson, MO, I was surrounded by gun violence and have known countless friends and family that are either no longer with us or have their own stories of those that have passed. Where I am from, adults without education make a habit of internalizing these traumas and reenacting them on the youth. In the face of these issues, I turned to music and creativity as an outlet. At the time, composition, production and songwriting allowed me to deal with the frustrations that came with living in my city. With time I became more aware of my environment’s negative effect on my mental health, and I countered by focusing more intently on my craft. Still without language for my traumas and initially plagued by the same confidence and self-image issues that troubled those around me, I found a way to turn them into strengths. Not everyone can use words to describe what they experience, nor do they necessarily have the means to take themselves out of that environment. In high school, I created various benefit concerts to create scholarship funding for the music students in the grades below mine. I plan to continue this in college, coupling the opportunities to connect within the music industry with various courses on stock trading to build a scholarship foundation purely through music. If we can provide more educational resources and therefore provide even more opportunities to impoverished youth, entire future generations can exist without struggle. If more children have incentive to create, they may even find strength through similar outlets as the one that saved my life.