KL defines Hip-Hop as an ever growing urban arts and cultural movement rooted in the ideology of community upliftment and self-determination. Hip-Hop is a mechanism for community empowerment and individual acknowledgement.  It is a vehicle for expressing ones identity, and community experiences as well as a resistive force against oppression.  KL professional Teaching Artists are dedicated to harnessing the cultural relevance of Hip-Hop. 

Because of the marketable personality and the very nature of Hip Hop art forms, a segment of Hip Hop has been co-opted by the commercial industry, which in large part tends to exploit and perpetuate negative stereotypes.

Themes found in the lyrics and images of commercial/mainstream Hip-Hop, such as the glamorizing of wealth, fame and illicit activities, have had a major impact on the public’s perceptions of Hip-Hop. This predominant representation of Hip-Hop and its ever-evolving culture has also negatively influenced the self-perceptions and aspirations of youth and their communities.

Because of the frequency with which these well-financed images are displayed to the public, the engineered world of violence, rebellion and degradation of women portrayed in the products of irresponsible commercial companies has become the accepted norm defining Hip Hop.

In response to this misrepresentation of Hip-Hop culture, KL provides programming with the goal of presenting, promoting, and preserving original Hip-Hop’s ideas.

That is curriculum which upholds Hip Hop’s original vision of community pride, self-determination, social consciousness, and constructive life style choices. These programs promote artistic expression, discipline, and cross-cultural understanding as creative alternatives to drugs, gangs, prejudice, hostility and violence.

KL brings together the leading educators, professors, artists, and activists utilizing the media of Hip-Hop as relevant, dynamic and necessary educational tools to engage students across multi-disciplinary curricula with the primary goal of using Performance Art/Exhibitions and the learning process’ of various urban art aesthetics as a means to artistically and creatively express and engage the opinions of young people and their communities on topics that are relevant to their lives. 

While both edutaining (educating through entertaining) and serving as a catalyst for education advocacy and other societal concerns essential to the well being of youth and their communities, KL curriculum includes: study of original urban street art form techniques, researching of and knowledge building of global history, burning issue discussions, story-telling, improvisation, team building exercises, character development, playwriting, visual urban street art, music study, and choreography.