Philanthropic Jones looks to the future

Maybe once or twice a decade, there is a pop music moment so culturally pervasive that it feels like the microphone cord was attached directly to our collective memory banks. “We Are the World” was one, and the historic potency of that all-star 1985 effort for famine relief (it pulled in $63 million for the cause) still echoes in the mind of Quincy Jones, a key architect of the superstar project.

This week Jones will try to add another title to the songbook of celebrity altruism, but the musical Midas hasn’t gotten a vital audience -- the American public -- to listen up.

“No question, our focus has been on the music and event and not on getting the word out,” says Scott Painter, chief executive of the new charity called “We Are the Future.” “Quincy is an artist and that has

“We Are the Future” is also the title of the new song written by Jones, and it will be the theme of a concert in Rome on Sunday that the Grammy-winning musician and producer wants to make an annual linchpin event for a campaign to build large humanitarian centers for children in war-torn cities.

The concert features two dozen acts, among them U.S. pop stars Norah Jones, Alicia Keys and Eve, and a deep list of artists representing wide-ranging corners of music and the world map, such as Juanes, Andrea Bocelli, Simon Shaheen and Youssou N’Dour.

More big acts are expected to sign up, and the cause will need their celebrity wattage to light up its dream. The opening of children’s centers is a far more complicated undertaking than the one-time gesture of “We Are the World.” But Jones has global players for partners, including Uri Savir, a chief negotiator of the Oslo Peace Accords, and the project has the World Bank on board, as well as the mayors of 60 of the world’s most affluent cities.

The first center, a 50,000--square-feet complex, opened April 8, in Kigali, Rwanda, and has already become a day-care center, a school, a rare oasis of technology and healthcare as well as a site for arts and sports programs for youngsters, Painter said.

Other centers are scheduled to open this year in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Asmara, Eritrea; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Nablus on the West Bank.

The charity cites global studies that show 30,000 children die daily in regions of war and recent war, a great many of them succumbing to hunger, neglect and preventable death by disease.

MTV will air the event live on many of its overseas outlets, but its U.S. home-base channel will air an abbreviated version of the event’s scheduled four hours on a later date.

-- Geoff Boucher