Arts Learning

We provided over 500 sessions (at least one hour each; average of two hours) at 18 recreation centers throughout Saint Paul in our summer, afterschool, and no school day programs. Types of art included: visual arts, mask and puppetry, theater, hip hop dance, painting and collage, filmmaking, jewelry, sculpture and clay, paper arts, break dance, and Aztec dance. We held ten theatre performances in conjunction with Teatro del Pueblo and Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater as part of family night celebrations. For teenagers, we held monthly open-mic nights, weekly writing circles, and short-term workshops on mural art, film production, hip hop dance, MC/rapping, and music video production. We evaluated our outcomes through tracking the number of sessions held, types of art, and by meeting monthly as a partnership advisory committee. 2: Our model's goal was to bring art to neighborhoods and reach the areas most in need. We accomplished this goal by working in 18 recreation centers across the city. Approximately 80 percent of participants qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, and the number was 90 percent or greater at some centers. These participants are unlikely to access any of the fee-based arts learning options available in our community, so offering free programming mitigated cost as a barrier. We obtained income data for participants who attend Saint Paul Public Schools through our participation in the Sprockets database, which allows for aggregate demographic data from the District's data. Our high number of participants and neighborhood-based locations show that transportation as a barrier was mitigated because we were able to reach over 2,000 individuals.