www.artscorps.org

The Kirlin Foundation is proud to be a founding investor in Arts Corps. Here is a great example of clear vision, strategic and inventive efficiency, and excellent leadership. In a remarkably short time, this organization has proven to be an effective, successful, and passionate contributor to our community. Please read on, and visit their website. Better yet, find a way to support this important work, and see what it does for your heart.

“I feel calm, I have more friends, I dream in color.  I learned that I am calm at my imagined house.” –Arts Corps student

Arts Corps is a Seattle-based non-profit youth development organization that offers free arts classes to low-income kids grades K-12.  Founded in 2000, Arts Corps has brought free arts education to over 5,000 kids, nurturing their critical thinking, individual power and creativity.  This past year, Arts Corps offered 150 classes in visual arts, theatre, music, dance and poetry by placing professional teaching artists at 25 different community centers and schools. Our evaluation shows that our classes significantly increase student self-confidence, compassion for others, communication skills, and independent thinking.

At Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries, a groundbreaking conference about arts education held in Los Angeles in 2000, Elliot Eisner, Lee L. Jacks Professor of Child Education at Stanford University, spoke of the intellectual, creative and developmental skills that students acquire through the arts, and identified many powerful outcomes of arts education.  The arts:

• teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships
• teach children that problems can have more than one solution
• celebrate multiple perspectives
• teach children that, in complex forms of problem solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity
• teach students that small differences can have large effects.

Such outcomes strengthen students in all aspects of their lives and are the essential traits of leadership.

Low-income children receive an unequal education, specifically in the arts.  Nationwide, 25 percent of school principals reported in 2004 that they have decreased time for arts instruction in their schools. In Washington State, 60% of K-12 public schools offer less than one hour of visual arts education, and 70% offer no theater or dance experience at all.  This cutback in school arts disproportionately affects low-income students, as they are less likely to be involved in the arts than those from economically advantaged families. Yet research shows that low-income students who take part in the arts in or out of school do better academically compared to students who don’t.  Research also validates the value of arts education more broadly to contribute to the social and emotional development of a child.

Arts Corps is also beginning to affect the demand for arts education in-school.  While the schools within the Seattle Public School District struggle to figure out how to meet testing requirements, some are beginning to look to a richer arts curriculum as a better way to reach all students and raise learning levels.  Because of our success out of school, we are now being asked to bring Arts Corps programming in school and raising awareness about the potency of the learning. 

In 2003, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels gave Arts Corps the Award for Excellence in Arts Education. In January 2005, Arts Corps was awarded the 2005 Martin Luther King Jr. Award by the City of Seattle for its commitment to the ideas of Dr. King. In 2005, Lisa Fitzhugh was selected as one of REDBOOK Magazine’s “Mothers & Shakers,” an award recognizing those who have initiated extraordinary grassroots community efforts that have the potential to create national and international models for change.

Arts Corps serves a critical need, providing much-needed arts education opportunities for underserved youth not only to enrich their lives, but also to give them avenues for creative expression, individual development and empowerment.  Arts Corps invites you to join in this vision and to witness the power of this work.  For more information, please visit their website www.artscorps.org.

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Photos ©Susie Fitzhugh