The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and its cultural partners—the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services—recognized 13 exceptional programs across the country for their work in presenting rich arts and humanities learning opportunities to young people. Michelle Obama praised the power of the arts to change young people’s lives as she helped hand out the awards, including one from her Chicago hometown, Friday, Nov 22, at the White House, the Associated Press reports via MSNBC.
Storycatchers Theater (detained & incarcerated youth), Chicago
The Chicago winner of an award from the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program, Storycatchers Theatre’s programs for detained and incarcerated youth, uses a gender-based approach to work with juvenile offenders, who, research is starting to confirm, are all too often the victims of trauma themselves, including physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. They often come from troubled families or live in communities prone to violence, and Meade Palidofsky, Storycatchers’ founder and artistic director, believes that using the somewhat unexpected vehicle of musical theater, the programs help incarcerated young people explore and present their deeper stories.
One program, for example, works with boys at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. In the Temporary Lockdown program, trained teaching artists collaborate with groups of young people to help them write and share their personal experiences, often eliciting information that they have never before revealed. “Sharing the stories takes away the stigma of these horrible things that have happened to you,” Ms Palidofsky explained.
Participants’ narratives also become the basis for staged readings, as well as the inspiration for one-act musical theater productions. Along with building communication and teamwork skills, the process of working out a play’s dramatic structure—with its characters, conflicts, and resolution—gives young people a chance to further examine the consequences of past choices and “decide what roles they want to play in the future,” she said.
In a 2010 interview, Ms Palidofsky spoke with the Huffington Post about people’s perception of girls who are incarcerated. She was speaking at the time about a program called Fabulous Females at the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice in Warrenville:
I think when people think of kids that are locked up, they think of them as bad kids, evil kids, or dysfunctional kids. They think that for anyone who is locked up, there is something wrong with them. I think what people learn when they come in to work with the girls is that what’s dysfunctional is our system. What’s dysfunctional is that we don’t have a lot of systems that work for kids on the outside. They learn that these kids are kids. They have potential. They learn that these kids are really likable and smart and could be somebody if society helps them out.
When the girls tell their stories, it becomes so clear why they are locked up. It usually starts from a trauma they have experienced, causing them to be angry and depressed, which causes them to drop out of school, do drugs, join gangs, and eventually become incarcerated. It’s a pretty clear cycle. It can be surprising for some who come and work with the girls since they’ve never thought about it before.
Last year, Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Ricardo Muti visited the Warrenville facility as part of the Storycatchers program, the Chicago Tribune reports. He not only got several volunteers to marry, but he led about 14 girls in an animated lesson about Verdi’s opera Macbeth. With help from the CSO’s Institute for Learning, members of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago—the CSO’s training orchestra—participate both as instrumentalists for the group’s musical theater production and as teaching artists.
OrchKids, Baltimore
The chance to occasionally play with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is one of the amazing perks for participants in the orchestra’s OrchKids program, which serves kids who live in some of Baltimore’s most challenged neighborhoods. Committed to connecting the orchestra more closely with the community, BSO music director Marin Alsop founded the program in 2008, using part of her MacArthur “genius” award to seed the effort. OrchKids was inspired by Venezuela’s El Sistema, a program that has used music to change the lives of thousands of children living in poverty.
Marin Alsop, 2005 (The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation)
Although most of the public elementary schools in Baltimore City have no music program, OrchKids currently works in four Title I schools in Baltimore, where it uses an intense involvement in music to spark development across all facets of the young people’s lives. Starting at the pre-K level with in-school “bucket bands,” students progress in the first grade to after-school classes, where they’re introduced to string and wind instruments. In second grade, students can choose an instrument and take it home to practice. OrchKids—which holds classes five days a week during the school year and for a month in the summer—stays with students through the sixth grade.
The Baltimore Sun quoted Ms Alsop as saying that there’s more to OrchKids than just exposing kids to classical music, probably for the first time ever. “I do feel that music has already given them a broader sense of the world. When you start to see yourself mastering something so complicated [as a musical instrument], then you can see yourself mastering something else,” she said.
Other award winners
Art Reach, Provincetown, Mass. The quaint beaches of Cape Cod hide the difficult rural life for residents of the region, notes Lynn Stanley, curator of education for the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM). Given the seasonal economy and high unemployment rates, many families struggle to make ends meet. With limited transportation and after-school options, young people are often at a loss for productive ways to spend their time. Enter PAAM, with its strong commitment to education since its founding, nearly 100 years ago. The Art Reach program is aimed at 13- to 20-year-olds, recruited from public schools. It uses the arts to give young people a chance to nurture their creative talents and develop relationships with adults and peers. Classes are held four times a week, and the curriculum is eclectic and constantly evolving. Activities for the students include creative collaborations; lectures on art, film, music, graphic novels, video production, and other media; and gallery talks.
Boston Children’s Chorus, Boston, Mass. Formed by Hubie Jones, a social worker with no background in music, the BCC is not only a vehicle for music education but a “catalyst for social change.” It recruits a diverse group of young people from around Boston, where many neighborhoods and schools remain heavily polarized. About 500 participants share a love of music, which helps to dissolve racial, socioeconomic, and religious barriers among them. “Music is a language that almost everyone speaks,” explains BCC Executive Director David Howse. “And, when you sing together, the barriers that might otherwise prevent people from coming together are diminished.” The chorus performs about 40 concerts a year in the Boston area and across the United States, presenting an eclectic repertoire that ranges from motets to Mozart to Motown. Along with performing on numerous occasions with the Boston Pops, for five years, the chorus produced a nationally syndicated Martin Luther King Celebration concert. The BCC also tours internationally. In recent years, their itinerary has included performances in Southeast Asia, Jordan, Mexico, Japan, and the UK.
Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts Inc., Buffalo, N.Y. CEPA’s Community-Based Youth Education Program endeavors to create an environment that will bolster young people’s enthusiasm for learning. The photography and computer skills that participants learn through the program help students gain confidence in their ability to master new things. All of the program’s initiatives include creative writing components. Working with professional writers from Just Buffalo Literary Center, participants strengthen their literacy skills as they translate their photographic visions into poems, short fiction, or essays. CEPA selects works from its community-based program to feature in its gallery exhibitions. Bus shelters throughout the city also display artworks from the Reclaiming Buffalo program, helping to share the students’ inspiring visions with the wider community, while showing the young people that they, too, can be part of the conversation about the city’s future.
Ifetayo Youth Ensemble, Brooklyn, N.Y. Young people’s voices are often missing from discussions about issues that directly impact their lives. The Ifetayo Youth Ensemble, a performing arts group that creates pieces about pressing social concerns, provides youth in Brooklyn with the opportunity to join the dialogue. The ensemble is a program of the Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy, an arts school serving neighborhoods in the Brooklyn area where rates of poverty are high and educational attainment is low. Founder Kwayera Archer-Cunningham created the ensemble more than 20 years ago to help young people “develop a voice and have a platform for it to be heard,” she said. “We wanted young people to feel powerful, not powerless, to make change.” Over the course of three years, the ensemble’s 29 members create an original performance piece that explores a social issue of their choice. Participants spend an entire year researching the topic, through interviews and other primary sources, so that they can speak with authority to audiences of their peers. At the same time, members receive high-level instruction in dance, music, and theater.
Investigating Where We Live, Washington, D.C. Every summer, 35 students from the Washington area eagerly play the role of exhibition designer, developing their photographic eye over a five-week period. This isn’t just an academic exercise: The National Building Museum (NBM) displays their work as part of its Investigating Where We Live program, attracting thousands of visitors. The group concentrates on a different Washington neighborhood each year. Students have explored revitalized neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill’s Stanton Park, as well as Anacostia, a historically underserved community in the southeast quadrant, according to Andrew Costanzo, the NBM’s outreach programs manager. Fanning out with digital cameras, recorders, and notepads, the young people interview community residents, search archives, and rely on their keen observation skills to find each neighborhood’s unique story. The project encourages students to “think about the world around them as a series of choices and consider what it takes to make changes in their own community or to preserve its history,” Mr Castanzo said.
Pearl Bailey Youth Program, Newport News, Va. The Pearl Bailey Library has created posters encouraging young people to read, and local people are the stars on the posters. The posters “make the young people feel like rock stars” while sending the message that reading is cool, says Sonya Scott, senior youth information services specialist at the library. That’s an important message for residents of the library’s surrounding community, referred to as the Southeast Community. Southeast is the city’s most economically disadvantaged neighborhood, with higher violent crime rates and unemployment and lower rates of educational achievement than other areas of the city. The library has taken unusual steps to establish itself as a safe space where young people can gather to learn, have fun, and develop friendships: advisory councils of teens and younger children have been created; there’s an “urban lit” book club for teens; and a club focused on anime and manga has been established. Through these programs, the library has established itself as a strong center for the community and broadened young people’s horizons.
Project AIM (Arts In Motion), El Paso, Tex. Patients who are admitted to the pediatric oncology unit at El Paso’s Providence Memorial Hospital receive state-of-the-art cancer treatments, as well as a healing dose of art. Four afternoons a week, artists from an organization called Creative Kids invite young cancer patients into the hospital’s art and digital media studios. Together, they work on painting and printmaking projects, plus graphic-design pieces. Patients who are in isolation, or not well enough to leave their rooms, receive bedside visits from an artist armed with canvases, paints, and brushes. The purpose is to incorporate art therapy into the patients’ traditional treatment regimen, to help young people navigate the often-frightening journey through cancer. “Kids who have been diagnosed with cancer often have a hard time understanding what’s going on, and art is a great outlet for young people to get their thoughts and feelings out,” explains co-founder and executive director Andrea Gates-Ingle. “We like to say that doctors take care of the patient’s physical health and that we take care of their emotional well-being.” A gallery on the hospital’s pediatric floor displays the young people’s art. Bus shelters and the Southwest Airlines terminal at the El Paso International Airport showcase the patients’ artwork.
Project Discovery, Dallas, Tex. About 900 high school students from the greater Dallas area, through an industry-leading theater-education program called Project Discovery, get the opportunity to attend plays at the Dallas Theater Company. Participants from more than 30 Title I schools, located in lower-income neighborhoods, each see a full season’s worth of DTC productions at no charge. Along with performances, the program provides transportation and pre-show workshops for students, as well as workshops and study guides for teachers. DTC artistic director Kevin Moriarty designed Project Discovery to provide an “authentic” theater experience. Instead of seeing a carefully vetted play in a theater filled with other students, Project Discovery participants attend regular evening performances, sitting in groups of three or four, alongside patrons. The students also join other theatergoers in post-show, artist-led discussions. Attending DTC’s full season exposes students to a wide variety of playwrights, genres, and subjects. “We don’t hide what’s in a show,” says Rachel Hull, director of education and community enrichment. “If there’s potentially offensive language, violence, or intimacy on stage, we’re up front with the teachers, while conveying why that material is important to telling the story,” she continues.
Summer Institute, New York, N.Y. Every summer, 150 young women from the New York City and Newark, N.J., areas spend six weeks at an unusual institute, taking courses like “Poetry and Revolution” and “Using the Web for Social Change”—classes they would rarely find in their own high schools. The New York-based Sadie Nash Leadership Project (SNLP) sponsors the Summer Institute primarily for young women of color from low-income families. Adolescence is a time when girls are not only discovering their identities but also facing societal pressures that can stifle their voices, explains founder Cecilia Clarke. Low-income young women “have the additional challenge of negotiating their identity against the backdrop of racism and class discrimination,” she adds. The Summer Institute empowers participants to become “agents of change in their lives and in the world.” The institute’s sessions include humanities, leadership, and art classes. The curriculum introduces participants to the concepts of power, privilege, and oppression.
WriteGirl, Los Angeles, Calif. WriteGirl primarily targets teenage girls from critically underserved neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area. These communities have high drop-out rates, and young girls can encounter numerous stumbling blocks on the path to adulthood. Through the process of writing, “young women can develop their ideas, discover their views, and become more aware of what matters in their lives,” says Keren Taylor, founder and executive director. As young women gain greater self-knowledge and develop more confidence expressing themselves, they’ll be better equipped to navigate the teenage years, she adds. The program matches girls with professional women writers for weekly one-on-one mentoring and creative writing sessions at libraries or cafés. The girls and their mentors also come together once a month for workshops that focus on specific genres. Then, in songwriting workshops, professional songwriters turn the girls’ lyrics into instant songs; at the close of playwriting workshops, actors perform the girls’ scenes. The honest, gutsy, and insightful poems and stories contained in anthologies published by the program provide clear evidence that “writing unties the tongue,” as one participant wrote. The program is especially proud that 100 percent of its seniors have completed high school and gone on to college.
Kuruka Maisha Foundation, Nairobi, Kenya. Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is a gleaming commercial and industrial center. Alongside its upscale suburbs, however, are poverty-stricken neighborhoods, swollen from an influx of residents from rural areas without enough jobs to sustain them. An estimated 150,000 young people live on the streets. Many of these “street children” engage in dangerous activities just to survive. In 2004, Kenyan engineer and community activist Nick Balongo partnered with friends and community members to establish Kuruka Maisha, an arts school. Through intensive training in circus and performing arts, Nairobi’s street children are finding hope and joy and pathways out of poverty. With its programs, Kuruka Maisha is transforming the lives of vulnerable street children. The goal is to provide street children and youth with training in the visual and performing arts so they can become self-sufficient and improve their quality of life. A mentorship program supplements the teens’ arts education with life-skills and leadership training, to support their ongoing development as responsible citizens.