It’s been 2 weeks since the last Speak 2B Free newsletter, blog post or radio interview. I was taking a break to do fundraising for a non profit, Light Path for Haiti. This experience has been very difficult for me personally and emotionally, but it has made me think a lot about our roles as global citizens. How far do we stretch ourselves to help others? I learned that people forget tragedies as soon as the media stops reporting on them, we go back to being complacent and part of that is because the world is so filled with horror stories and tragedies and we have our own s*** to worry about.

I keep asking myself if it is enough to donate money to a cause or do we have to do more? Is it even our role to try to help others? How do we help others without taking on the role of saviors and denying them their dignity?

Today’s Speak 2B Free radio show is titled: Using spoken word poetry in cause marketing; we interviewed, spoken word poet, musician and history teacher, Pete Shungu (find him on facebook) to share his story and talk about how he uses spoken word poetry to promote social justice.

Pete is doing something out of the ordinary – he and his fiancé, Melissa Hines, are going down to volunteer at the Casa San Jose orphanage in Colima, Mexico for 8 months and are having a spoken word and music event to raise funds for the orphanage.

What is cause marketing?

Not everyone can take 8 months out of their lives to go work in Mexico or build houses in less developed countries but that is not the only way to help others. Cause marketing can be as simple as promoting and supporting an organization that you believe in and standing for something instead of being complacent.

I have always believed that to be able to stand for something we need to have a better understanding of ourselves and to understand ourselves we need to be able to introspect, which is why I was excited when Pete mentioned that spoken word poetry has been a tool to help him introspect and also combine his love of writing with his love of performing.

One of the things that we enjoyed talking to Pete about is the fact that he writes what can be called social poetry about being bi racial and how even though he identifies as a person of color, he still has a white mom and he is not one or the other, he is both. His experiences and his identity have shaped him to be more aware of the world around him and he uses poetry to bridge the gap between people from different races.

Poetry is  powerful tool to support and market a cause, as Pete pointed out. Spoken word poetry cannot solve the world’s problems but it can bring people to a benefit and be used to promote a message and raise awareness. One of the stories that Pete shared was that he often performs poems that some people in the audience do not necessarily agree with but despite their different opinion these people often come up to him after a show and tell him that they respected his message in his poetry, even though they did not agree with it. To quote Pete: “when you put a message into a poem most people will be enthralled by the art of it and then they start thinking.”

At the end of the day spoken word poetry is a way to share your story with an audience and stories can change opinions, and when we start to change people’s opinions and points of views that’s when we start to change the world.

You can support the East meets West Bookstore and the Casa San Jose orphanage in Colima, Mexico by attending the fund raising event in Cambridge:

Thursday, July 22 · 8:00pm
East Meets West bookstore
934 Mass Ave
Cambridge, MA

You can also catch Pete performing with his hip hop band, the Afro D All Starz and the ARTiculation spoken word crew on Friday, August 13 at Strand Theatre in Dorchester, MA at 6pm, the show is free and all ages.

Image by Flickr user believer9