What If A Woman Invented Pan? Part one.

Lorna Green took us back to the1930s, when the instrument was born, and put women in the driver’s seat of their pan destiny. Lorna is the Founder and CEO of Cultural Academy for Excellence (CAFE). CAFE is a youth-based program which uses the performing arts as the catalyst to develop the passion and discipline for learning, leadership, and academic achievement:

It’s the 1930’s – a woman has devised the century’s solitary acoustic instrument. SHE demands that spaces nurturing HER creation embrace HER “sisters” (cousins, girlfriends, aunties, grannies,) with freedom to eat, sit, stand, walk, run, practice, talk, cry, laugh, study, sing, and be themselves. No waiting for schools to legitimize pan. No hoping that ghetto patriarchies fashioning the new national culture will accept HER kind. No, the GENIUS insists HER children, families, and society challenge the steelpan movement at its inception – to build newer, better histories of the hopes and loves of a great people.

 In 1996, Lorna Green founded the Cultural Academy for Excellence (CAFE) in Mt. Rainier, Maryland. Mrs. Green, a Trinidad & Tobago native, was always impressed by the versatility of the steelpan and the positive impact it had on young people. After pursuing her education and professional career in the U.S., she established this unique arts-based program which uses the steelpan to enhance academic, social and leadership skills; and provide alternatives to negative behaviour.