Pharrell Williams has teamed up with Amazon and Georgia Tech to launch a new music-making competition for today’s youth.
What We Know:
- On Tuesday, Pharrell’s education equity nonprofit, YELLOW, announced on Twitter their new project with Amazon and Georgia Tech called “Your Voice is Power.” This initiative aims at teaching underserved communities with students in middle and high school an equal opportunity lesson in coding, racial injustice, and creativity.
https://twitter.com/Pharrell/status/1351530350082621440
- “Your Voice is Power” will be open to about 100,000 students across the U.S. and Canada. The program will feature five lesson plans and teaching modules that will teach students coding while introducing them to professionals who use music and computer science to fight for racial justice and spark conversations among students and teachers about racial injustices.
- The project will also have a competition where students will be tasked with addressing racial equity while remixing Pharrell’s new song “Entrepreneur” using computer coding and incorporating their own voice into the song via Georgia Tech’s learn-to-code-through-music platform, EarSketch.
- The first round of the competition will start on January 19th and run through March 12th. Student-made remixes will be judged by a panel of Amazon engineers, Amazon Music team members, and music industry professionals. Winners will be picked based on the quality of music, the complexity of their code, and their thoughts and calls to action on racial justice. Prizes for students range from $5,000 scholarships, grant money for a business, or different monetary amazon gift cards.
- Pharrell explained his choice to collaborate with these corporate giants saying, “This collaboration between YELLOW, Amazon, and Georgia Tech is a celebration of Black creators and change-makers. YELLOW, at its core, believes that education is a pathway to success. Teaching kids future-ready skills like coding, especially those kids for whom opportunities like this have not been equally distributed, is how we prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
We are excited to see what the next generation of artists and creators are able to achieve!
