Chaka Khan: Music to Kids' Ears

Her epic career spans more than three decades, and her hits are more than Grammy winning multi-platinum sensations — they're anthems to generations of fans. "I'm Every Woman." "I Feel For You." "Ain't Nobody."

But talk to Chaka Khan for a matter of minutes, and it's clear where her real passion lies: with kids.

"My whole career I've been assisting children — on a smaller scale, of course, than now. But all my life I've been working with children. They're my favorite people, and the most subjugated, innocent and mistreated ofttimes — the ones who suffer the most."

It was with those kids in mind that Khan started the Chaka Khan Foundation back in 2003 — making her life-long passion an official non-profit that's getting down to some serious work helping youth in Los Angeles.

"My heart's virtue is to help and protect the innocent," Khan tells Tonic. "That's what I'm about. That's why I'm here."

"I happen to be a great singer," she adds. "[But] this gift of music is a tool so that I can reach more people on a larger level to be of service. The biggest gift is of being of service. That's the rush."

Starting Friday, the public can get in on the rush, as the Chaka Khan Foundation kicks off a fundraising auction, with proceeds going directly to help inner-city kids find a spark and an education they can't find anywhere else. Up on the block? Everything from gift cards and jewelry, to an exotic vacation, to one truly priceless prize for any music lover: Dinner with Chaka Khan herself.

"The auction is going to be amazing, and I just urge everyone, 'Let's do this!' Let's do this for our future," she says. "I'm appealing to everyone to invest in our future ... our children. They are our most valuable commodity, and we have to stand up and treat them as such."

Getting Down to Basics

Khan's Foundation is working to change the world in the most intimate way possible: Working one-on-one with kids on the edge in order to change their worlds.

Currently focused in on about 150 school kids, primarily from South Central, L.A., Khan's organization is busing kids three days a week to private after-school tutoring at USC — and taking them on excursions to places, and experiences, they might otherwise never see.

Thanks to the Foundation's work, the kids in the program "are reading at grade level," Khan says, "which is like miraculous in the public school system right now. They're math is at grade level. That is, to me, something I can see." It's something she's proud of. But there's more to the program than surface-level education. "I am positive that what's really happening to these children is a paradigm shift that is going to affect them in every aspect of their lives. That is my hope; that is what I am going for."

Of all the accolades that have been showered upon Khan, none compare to the feeling she gets helping kids. "What can be bigger than having an effect someone's life? Having even the tiniest positive effect on a child's direction in life? When you see that happen, and you see them light up inside? This is what it's all about. It has to be."

It's for that reason Khan does much more than lend her name to the Foundation. "I'm very hands on. I have to go and check on them all the time in the tutoring classes," she says. "I just did an episode on Phineas and Ferb, the cartoon, and I got them an invite to go to Disney studios, where they draw the storyboards, do the music, all of it, and the kids saw how a cartoon comes together ... it's very intricate. We go to art museums, and plant flowers, we do all manner of stuff. There was a time when we took them up into Bear Stearns in Beverly Hills, and they've never been in a building that high before. The kids were standing there at the windows, 'Look! That's downtown.' Seeing beyond just their neighborhood.

"They learned about the stock market and got to invest a little bit. We just cover life. As much as we can. But you can only learn so much — you have to be able to learn, to be able to compute ... and you have to have that sacred relationship with someone, teacher and learner, and that's fundamental. So we're trying," Khan tells Tonic.

Part of the experience of working with kids means being able to adjust to their needs on the fly. For example, "I was taking the kids places and having them meet people, going to restaurants, learning how the restaurant business works, and a lot of the kids weren't getting it because they were in fifth grade but only reading at a third-grade level. So we did a full stop, and just went to education — and that's what we're doing right now."

Khan has the parents of kids in the program sign a contract stating that they will support their child, and the parents are called on to chaperone outings, and more. "We're serious," Khan says. And it's working: "They are doing so well. I'm so happy!"

Building on Her Roots

Chaka Khan was raised in Chicago "by two mothers and a father," she says, who all worked for the University of Chicago, and all served as inspirational mentors. Her stepmother was a Montessori school teacher. Her birth mom was an artist and painter. And her father was a philosopher, deep into Dostoevsky, who took off for Ibiza to shoot photos for a few years after divorcing her mom. "That opened my eyes to a whole world — that there is a world outside of Chicago, and America. I think he planted the seed, a thirst for knowledge of the world."

"I was a rebellious chick," Khan says, citing her time with the Black Panthers and more, but her parents supported her throughout, and were there to guide her when she needed it. Perhaps their biggest lesson? "Life is yours for the taking," she says. "You just have to be open, and open up to the openness."

It's a message she hopes to impart through the work of her Foundation. But it isn't so easy in a world where kids are tied to video games and the Internet more than real-life. "We were more hands on, organic, tasted, smelled, felt the world [when we were growing up]," she notes. "A lot of kids don't get that they're in font of a screen and playing a game. We played games, for real. That's a big difference."

"We have to bring them back to the real, first," Khan says. "You are empty, in a way, if you don't have that aspect of yourself ... and these kids are lost, in a big way."

Thanks to the Chaka Khan Foundation, more than a few kids in Los Angeles are on their way to being found.

After all, it's Khan's personal mission: "I will do everything I can," she says, "to ensure that any child I touch is gonna be alright."

Click Here to visit the Chaka Khan Foundation website, to make a donation, or to learn more about the auction.

Khan photo courtesy of Chaka Khan Foundation; Disney Studios photos by Clayton Everett.