Our Second Shift series features people working more than one job and finding creative ways to make money. This week, meet a New Yorker who loves kids so much, his passion spawned three different jobs. Want to be featured? Email Emily.Laurence@metro.us. Name: Adam Jacobs You’re the executive director for Kids Creative, a venture you helped launch. How did that come about? So it just kind of evolved from there? Are you still touring? How did you continue to build Kids Creative? And it all started from that studio summer camp. What is your third job? Is there anything else you want people to know? Follow Emily on Twitter: @EmLaurence
Age: 35
Residency: Flatbush, Brooklyn
Lives with: Wife and son
Number of jobs: 3
When I was in college, my brother and I started a summer camp for 12 kids, which was held in a studio apartment in Midtown Manhattan. They wrote and performed a musical play in the apartment. It was a little insane, but we realized we had something. So we started an afterschool program and the next summer, we held the summer camp in a theater.
Yeah! But at the same time, we were constantly writing music [with and for kids], so we started a band called The Dirty Sock Funtime Band. I’m Mr. Clown in the band, who has been compared to a hype man, but he’s in his own world, so it’s a bit hard to explain. We released a CD and toured all around the world, even to places like Japan and Guam. And all of this was happening while Kids Creative was becoming a full-fledged non-profit.
Currently, we are not. My wife just had a baby, so we’ve taken some time off. But the band will still do shows and some of the members will do solo shows. We’ll start touring again soon.
We developed the afterschool program and summer camp and started hiring our friends, who are musicians, and it became a really popular thing. People liked not just the class itself, but the philosophy behind it, which is that all ideas are good and also using creativity to learn. Now we work in 10 schools afterschool and have a performing arts summer camp on the Upper West Side. Plus, sports, homework help and other things of that nature.
I don’t think any of us could have foreseen what was coming.
I also tutor kids at a synagogue for their bar and bat mitzvahs, but am taking some time off since my son was just born.
It’s funny. It’s nice to have my serious executive director face on and then be able to be Mr. Clown and just scream, jump around and be really silly.
Second Shift: ‘I never saw this coming’
April Mulkey
