We Care New Orleans

Founded by Johnette Downing, We Care New Orleans is an informal group of children's musicians from North America joined together to help day care centers in the Metro New Orleans area rebuild their media collections after Hurricane Katrina. The group adopted five day care centers as well as the New Orleans Recovery School District and sent boxes of CDs, cassettes, books, toys, musical instruments, videos, art supplies and other items as donations. Each box included a note from the children's musician donor to the children for whom the items were intended. The note was a way of letting children in New Orleans know that real people across the continent care. For more information about We Care New Orleans, join our Yahoo Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wecareneworleans/

One donation we received had special meaning because it involved children helping other children. It was a box of hand-painted frogs from Feel the Music, The National Foundation for Music and Healing. Fifty percussion frogs were hand-painted by children who lost a parent on 9/11. The frogs symbolized how healing leaps from one community to another; from children of one disaster to children of another disaster. For more information about Feel the Music, check out: http://musicandhealing.org/