Photo Friday - A look back at Thriving Minds Summer Camp held at Booker T Washington

Middle school students from Dallas ISD participated in the Thriving Minds Summer Camp where they unleashed their creativity while participating in a variety of clubs including: stepping, krumping, cheerleading, fashion design, martial arts, visual arts and music production.

Join the Champions of Community Service today!

Super Bowl XLV will be here in 164 days!  Don't miss out on the opportunity to be part of North Texas Super Bowl history and take part in the largest communitywide service-learning program in U.S. history.

Neighborhood groups, religious organizations, classrooms and school groups, PTAs, communitybased organizations, Scouts, athletic teams and corporate affinity groups are encouraged to get involved! Projects can vary from neighborhood improvement to beautification, to documenting local history or culture through a photography exhibit, to focusing on real-life ways to address pressing social challenges like hunger, poverty or environmental issues.


Here are just a few examples of projects other SLANT 45 teams have done:

• Kindergarten and first grade students in Sherman ISD baked cookies and made thank you cards to show their appreciation for local firefighters and and police officers.
• The Green Team cleaned up the shoreline at Lake Grapevine.
• The Rockin' Rulin' Girlz are holding a drive to collect items for stray pets at the Ellis County SPCA.

It's easy to participate in SLANT 45 and make a difference in your community. Just form a team, come up with your own great project idea and register at slant45.org today!

How The Arts Can Make Understanding from Gibberish

Italian artist Adriano Celentano created the song below which hilariously demonstrates how English sounds to foreign speakers. Using gibberish words, he concocts a consonant heavy, drawn-out and at times grunty language which sounds eerily similar to our speech.


The video, despite its hopefully purposeful kitsch-iness, is quite extraordinary because it gives us a peek at ourselves through the eyes of others. Charles Horton Cooley calls this phenomenon “The looking glass self.” Essentially, we perceive who we are as individuals by the interactions that we have with others. If they treat us like we’re talented and beautiful, we believe ourselves to be, whether we are or not. Likewise, if people treat us like pariahs and failures, we will come to think the same.

So if we are constantly mirroring others’ perceptions of ourselves, how do we form our identity as a city, a community, a country or a continent? We understand a certain amount through news reports and the occasional visit abroad. But what makes this video notable is that art is used, with great efficacy, to tell us more than a thousand words could. Without saying a single sensible thing, Adriano Celentano provided an interesting portrait of our communication style. If you are like me, you might have asked yourself one hundred questions while watching. Things like, “I wonder how different Italian would sound if I learned the language? I wonder if our language makes the whole English-speaking world appear to have a certain type of personality? Does this make English sound brazen and fun or silly and weird?” In six minutes, he opened a window into the soul of how we relate ourselves to the world.

In certain ways, art is a much purer form of understanding than words. When language acts as a barrier, restricting understanding to only those we can speak with, the arts act as an open door. It causes us to relate at an almost primal level, taking into account our similarities as well as our differences. For those of us in education, it is easy to relate art as a way that we can come to understand discrete cultures, languages, neighborhoods and ethnicities that exist within our educational system. As our classrooms become more diverse, the arts can serve not only as a way to spur the mind but to spur understanding. In fact, James Catterall noted in his book “Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art” that schools offering rich dramatic and artistic experiences demonstrate better race relations among students and show that students show greater levels of empathy. By providing artistic exeriences to our youth, we are giving them the ability to succeed in a multi-national, ever-changing world.

How has art or your creative endeavors helped you bridge gaps in your life?

Photo Friday

For more than 15 years, Big Thought has partnered with the Dallas County Juvenile Department to give at-risk youth an outlet through which they can express themselves using either visual or performing arts platforms. This is a sampling of the visual art created during this summer's program. Hope you enjoy!

Hundreds come together to clean up McMillan Center

The recent West Dallas Community Center SLANT 45 project got us thinking about one our favorite things: community collaboration. Hundreds of volunteers from Bank of America, ExxonMobil’s Green Team, Trinity River Audubon Center, Austin Industries and many other local organizations braved the heat to paint, plow and plant on the grounds of the center where West Dallas youth have been coming for generations.

It was amazing to see the transformation that took place at and around the McMillan Center over the course of just a couple days, thanks to the hard work of volunteers from all across our city.

And in the end, that’s what SLANT 45 is really all about – working together to leave a legacy of service and collaboration that will last long after game day.

Visit slant45.org to find out how you can make a difference in your community!

SLANT 45 Patriots Welcome Home Heroes

Troops returning from overseas received a hero’s welcome from a SLANT 45 team and a former president as they stepped off the plane at D/FW International Airport yesterday.


The Collin County Patriots, a youth football team from Frisco, decided they wanted to show their appreciation for the hard work and sacrifice of our military. With help from the Welcome Home a Hero program, the Patriots planned a surprise welcome for the troops and handed out gift bags, bottled water and plenty of smiles and high-fives.

Honorary SLANT 45 chairs President and Mrs. Bush and SLANT 45 chairman Daryl Johnston were also on hand to shake hands and pose for pictures with some very surprised service men and women!

Woman Finds Inspiration Through Volunteering In 48 States; Visits Texas and Big Thought Today

For Anne Wishart Arnold-Ratliff, the adage “Not all who wander are lost” doesn’t really apply. Feeling purposeless after college, Anne embarked on an ambitious, 48-state trek throughout the contiguous U.S. to find her niche in this big ol’ world. Anne wasn’t content with backpacking and hostel-staying through the country like so many young post-grads do when feeling out-of-whack. Instead, she wanted to help. She explains, “My grandmother, Meme, always said that in the minute you begin feeling pity for yourself it is then your responsibility to help someone else.” With that in mind, she would pick seek out volunteer opportunities in each state that she visited.

Anne started her journey on January 4, 2010 and has been trucking ever since. To date, she’s visited 42 states and has helped out nonprofits and charity organizations in any task they could provide. She’s carved out an understanding of other cultures, people and situations through seeing and hearing inspiring stories of some of America’s most overlooked. For instance, in Virginia, she volunteered with an organization that rebuilds the lives of the formerly incarcerated through job training. In Utah, she worked at an ESL center. She pitched in at animal shelters and big-time events, gave her time stuffing envelopes and painting walls. And like Willie sang, she’s back on the road again.

Today, Anne stopped by Dallas to help out Big Thought on the Texas leg of her trip. A performer at heart, Anne has always held a special place in her heart for the arts. Hence, she stopped by our office to help us get out the word for events and to research creative activities for Dallas children and families. We couldn’t be happier that she chose as her destination in Texas because Anne embodies so much of the Big Thought spirit. As our name implies, we are an organization that imagines possibilities -- gigantic, huge, tremendous ones, in the name of creativity and education. We believe that all of our youth, regardless of where they live or learn, have the ability to imagine – and achieve -- great things in their lives. In essence, our young learners are full of big thoughts and we want to nurture them. That’s why we were so excited to have Anne, who had the audacity to believe that service to others can change not only her life but others around her.

To learn more about Anne, please visit her website: http://48sop.com/blog/ (48 states of purpose, that is.)

If you are inspired by her story and want to do more, visit http://www.slant45.org/ to see how you can give back to your community and be a part of something bigger than yourself.

SLANT 45 Team Fighting Hunger in Fort Worth

The FROGs (Friends Reaching Our Goals) is a SLANT 45 team of second graders from Tanglewood Elementary in Fort Worth whose mission is to fight hunger in their city.

Through a series of summer fundraisers, they have raised nearly $1,000 and collected over 1,000 cans of food for the Tarrant Area Food Bank! The team also spent an afternoon packing backpacks for the Food Bank’s SummerPacks for Kids program, which provides weekend food for needy children in Tarrant County.

Next week the FROGs kick off “Hits Against Hunger” and “Kicks Against Hunger”, where for every a hit a teammate gets in baseball or softball or every kick a teammate gets in soccer, sponsors will donate a dollar to the Food Bank.

Check out their blog for more about what the FROGs have accomplished so far and what they have planned for the fall.

What’s your SLANT 45? Register your own team now at slant45.org!