Courtesy photo Left, Joe Reilly and William Copeland of The Long Hairz Collective See 'em Live William Copeland and Joe Reilly of The Long Hairz Collective Saturday, July 31 Creole Gallery, 1218 Turner St., Lansing Show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15. For more information, contact the Leaven Center at (989) 855-2606 or leavencenter@leaven.org.

William Copeland is a hip-hop MC. He's also a community activist, a worker for peace and justice. It would be more or less impossible to say where the one role ends and the other begins.

Copeland is part of the Long Hairz Collective, a collaborative musical project that began three years ago in Ann Arbor. He writes songs as much to educate as to entertain. He performs in schools and other community settings as often as he does in bars or coffeehouses.

"We try to have a blend of performing for entertainment and performing to bring people together in community spaces," Copeland said, speaking by phone from Detroit, his hometown.

Their reasons and occasions for bringing people together vary. The members of the collective have different commitments, different priorities.

Copeland, for instance, has worked with a non-

violence group called Peace is Power, with Detroit's Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership and various youth groups.

Generally, though, the group is trying to pull people out into the world and convince them that they can make a difference there.

"We're trying to get people to look outside of themselves," Copeland said, "to get people to see there's situations in other people's lives and how you can have a positive effect in those people's lives."

The Long Hairz are an almost accidental group. The three original members -- Copeland, singer-songwriter Joe Reilly and spoken word artist Brian Babb -- met at the University of Michigan. All were performers, all of them involved with minority activism. They started performing together, not because they wanted to start a band, but because they liked each other's music.

One day, Reilly got a show and invited the other two to perform. For whatever reason, he wrote, "the return of the long hairz" on the poster.

The collaboration soon produced an album, Dreadlocks and Pony Tales, better than an hour of acoustic hip-hop, urban-folk guitar and spoken word performances. Those performances are marked by the group's community-focused politics, their feelings for the city of Detroit and their determination to deal with the racism, violence and neglect that have made the city what it is.

Their collaboration -- and over the years, it's included other local artist like Ann Arbor folk singer Lisa Hunter and Detroit slam poet Angela Jones -- has "come out of the fact that we are growing as solo artists," Copeland said, "but we respect and love each other's art so much that, a lot of times, when we get solo opportunities, we want to include the others.

"As we kept developing poems, songs, raps, we would just blend them together."

The collaboration has even survived a distinct lack of proximity. In the past year or so, Babb took off for San Diego, Reilly moved to Chicago and Copeland did a several month stint in New Haven, Conn. He and Reilly have continued performing together, occasionally flying Babb out when they get a gig that pays enough.

Copeland said the time has been productive nonetheless. All three are working on their solo careers, and Copeland has been learning some lessons in unexpected places.

"I've been substitute teaching, which is a kind of performance in and of itself. Substitute teaching for seventh- and eighth-graders, surprisingly enough, has made me a much more confident MC and performer."

Of course performing is only part of it. They care about making good music, sure, but Copeland said they judge themselves, too, by what they've inspired.

"I hope we've encouraged people to write, encouraged people to pick up instruments, encouraged people to rap, encouraged people to communicate," he said. "We just try to be inspirational. We don't come from a celebrity perspective. We come from a perspective of, 'Come on, all of us have art within us. We're up here today, but you could be up here making your art, too.'"