Organization
Tiny Toones
Tiny Toones is a youth center in Phnom Penh that uses breakdance, hip hop and music to draw street children and young people from poor families into education.[1][2] It was founded in 2005 by Tuy Sobil, known as KK.[3][1]
History
Tuy Sobil was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and grew up in Southern California, where he became a b-boy as a teenager.[1] After he was deported to Cambodia, children in his Phnom Penh neighborhood heard he could breakdance and kept asking him to teach them.[1][4] In 2005 he began lessons for a few of them in his own home.[3][1]
The group grew into a center in a slum neighborhood close to the middle of the city.[2][5] In 2008 dancers and students in Long Beach organized a benefit for it at California State University, Long Beach.[4] In April 2009 seven of its members began its first tour of the United States, with a stop in Philadelphia arranged with the Cambodia Association of Greater Philadelphia. Tuy Sobil was unable to obtain a United States visa to travel with them.[1] Funding from the group Bridges Across Borders helped it open a multi-service center.[1]
In 2014 Tiny Toones received the Maya Ajmera Sustainability Award from the Global Fund for Children, which helped it set up The Cool Lounge, a café with a dance and recording studio that earns income for the center.[6]
Programs
The center teaches breakdance, rapping, DJing, singing, music production and art.[2][4] Students also take English and Khmer, math and computer classes, and learn about human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS.[1][2] In its early years, dance lessons came with daily reading and writing in English and Khmer and a strict rule against drugs.[4] Most of the teachers grew up on the same streets as the students.[2][5] Tiny Toones lists peer mentoring and a scholarship program, which it began in 2010.[7][6]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Robert Moran, "Cambodian break-dancers to visit Philadelphia", The Philadelphia Inquirer (April 25, 2009)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Lee Starnes, "Saigoneer Dispatches: How a Phnom Penh Youth Center is Using Hip Hop to Empower Street Kids", Saigoneer (April 10, 2014)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Tiny Toones, History (read October 13, 2026)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Sander Roscoe Wolff, "Students & Pro Dancers Raise Funds For Cambodian Bboys", Long Beach Post (October 14, 2008)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Romi Grossberg, "Healing through Hip Hop in the Slums of Phnom Penh Cambodia", Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (undated)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Global Fund for Children, "Tiny Toones: going beyond sports" (November 26, 2018)
- ↑ Tiny Toones, home page (read October 13, 2026)