Quincy Jones

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Quincy Jones knows he was lucky. When he was young, growing up during the Depression in Chicago and Seattle, he ran with some rough crowds. That is, until the night he and his friends broke into a building and discovered a piano. "That was it," Jones says. "Music grabbed me around the throat and has been there ever since. I was blessed that I was shown something. I could see the light to get a way out."

But the Grammy Award-winning producer, arranger, composer and conductor knows that not all children find such harmony. So in 1991, he started The Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation to "confront the state of emergency that currently threatens the world's youth." The foundation's projects are as diverse as the music Jones has made throughout his five-decade career. And sometimes his good works and good music are combined. In 1985 he produced and conducted We Are The World, the alltime best selling single that raised money for Ethiopian famine relief.

Last year Jones's foundation selected five Los Angeles young people to travel with him to South Africa. (Four of them are shown above with Jones and the foundation's vice president.) In their "From South Central To South Africa" odyssey, they visited HIV-positive children and helped build homes. Assisting people who lacked even running water or electricity gave the students a new perspective on life. It was an "amazing transformation," Jones says.

Listen Up then made $5,000 donations to five local community organizations where the young people volunteer. They are now ambassadors for Jones's message, spreading the spirit of service while helping others. He would like to expand the program and bring a youth delegation from South Africa to Los Angeles.

Jones's success with From South Central to South Africa inspired an invitation in January to address the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. Since then, he and Listen Up have been working with world business leaders to bridge Africa's digital divide by importing computers and technology training. Closer to home, Jones has produced Say it Loud, a five-part television special for VH1 that celebrates black music in America. Listen Up is developing an accompanying 15-part curriculum for more than 100,000 classrooms. Plans are also underway to launch Listen Up Radio, a student-run Internet radio station.

"Quincy appeals to everybody," says Listen Up executive director Shawn Amos. "That puts the foundation in a unique position, because he has credibility in all areas." One of the organization's aims, Amos says, is to play matchmaker, joining Jones's high-powered associates from the music industry with successful community organizations that don't always get the attention and resources they deserve.

And any way Listen Up can help children is music to Jones's ears. "I see young kids giving up. They don't think they can live past 25," he says. "It's a ray of hope when they realize they can expect more from their lives."-Sarah Lorge

For more information, write The Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, 4000 Warner Blvd., Building 139, Suite 25, Burbank, CA 91505, call 818-954-7756 or visit www.qjluf.org.