Every motivation has a seed, just like an apple tree. Many people wonder what motivates my involvement in The Jerkin Movement. In my opinion, my motivation should be similar to every entrepreneur in North America: global engagement and global responsibility for others. If you turn the history book back to 2001 you would see China’s joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). For those of you who don’t know, the WTO is the only international body dealing with the rules of trade between nations. China’s joining in late 2001was the culmination of the agreement of the world’s greatest powers to abide by the same rules regarding the trade of goods and services.
My family members are very active participants in academic society, yet I was a terrible student in school (K-12). When most people think of trends and social movements they usually associate them with an occurrence happening on a grassroots level, but in reality, most trends and social causes start at the academic public policy making level and trickle their way down to the grassroots level where everyday people educate the media, which in turn educates the masses. For example, when China joined the WTO it completely changed the way business and, in the case of this blog, North America function on a global level. It allowed producers of physical materials (clothes, toys, furniture, etc.) to outsource the manufacturing for literally pennies on the dollar. China has a unique relationship with its workforce where they are able to inspire them to work for the lowest wages of manufacturing in the world. Kudos to China, I guess.
The high majority of laborers (people who work everyday) in the United States attribute the struggling economy to a bad 8 years of Bush in the White House and a real estate bust which has led to hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. Many economists would beg to differ. If you sat down with one, more than likely they would tell you that North America is going through a period of economic transformation/reconstruction. The seed level of the masses’ adaptation to the mindset of transformation was manifested last year in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. But, the horn of economic transformation sounded off 9 years ago, and is becoming louder every year.
I felt the vibrations of this horn in 2004, which inspired me to spend the next 2 years of my life researching and traveling the international markets trying to achieve a self-education about the global markets and my place within it on a grassroots level. As I traveled and became more educated about what was happening in the world business-wise, specifically in areas like China, India, Middle East, and some of Africa, the anxiety of seeing the potential that many of my fellow Americans could be left behind turned my motivations of entrepreneurship into a passion and call to action of social entrepreneurship. Wikipedia defines a social entrepreneur as someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change . The question I posed to myself as a social entrepreneur was: “How could I bring about awareness to this dire issue our country is currently facing?”
I took it upon myself to collaborate with family member to design a learning method/curriculum to stimulate a learning culture and collaborative work environment with kids, parents, and teachers in Los Angeles Unified Schools. For more information about my curriculum, Google: Shariff Hasan “Home and Community”. In the curriculum I was able to take very complicated economic ideas about what the workforce should look like in the 21st century and, through collaborating with academics, we were able to create a classroom structure/environment that allowed the young students to learn how to educate themselves using technology and imagination. Oddly enough, many of the students had their own mini-entrepreneurial ventures, mainly focused on their ability to create music on their laptops and promote themselves through social network sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This interaction with the students motivated me to do more online research about the teenage social networking music scene. Being a filmmaker who previously released a teen film called “American High School”, I saw another opportunity in the teen genre to do a narrative around this teenage entrepreneurial movement, fueled by technology, I saw in Los Angeles inner city schools.
One day, I received a friend request on MySpace from an online music group called “New Boyz”. They introduced me to the teenage dance culture which recently made its way online through viral videos produced by the dancers. This was when I decided to combine the teenage entrepreneurship movement I had already been documenting with the New Boyz and other artists representing this positive entrepreneurial ideology. “The Jerk” was a dance and “Jerkin” was the way teens described an exciting occurrence (no pun intended). The concept of the story of “The Jerkin Movement" with the New Boyz as the focus was something I presented to the New Boyz, their parents, and current management. At the time, there were many more popular teenage artists online recording songs about the Jerk dance (such as YG, Tayf3rd, Vixens, etc.) but for me, the New Boyz, Earl Benjamin and Dominic Thomas, were classy and charismatic young men I wanted to promote to the masses as leaders to help bring the social awareness of economic opportunities through technology in the 21st century.
Over the last year, The Movement has grown exponentially around the world, which has resulted in my doing 2 feature film deals; one is an independent comedy entitled “The Function” and the other, a dance film being develop by a studio and produced by the same company responsible for dance hits like “You Got Served” (Google: “Jerkin the Movie” for more details). Now that The Jerkin Movement has reached international proportions, my focus of social entrepreneurship has now extended around the world and I am looking to educate the world’s youth about the opportunities existing through technology, self-expression, and out of the box creativity through curriculum, movies, TV shows, blogs, seminars, and public speaking. There are so many success stories around the world about teenagers who have become famous and profitable through the social network of The Jerkin Movement. Hopefully, this blog outlined my seed motivations for my involvement and promotion of The Jerkin Movement internationally.
good post, Shariff.
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