Arts Access

Kulture Klub Collaborative is proud to report on a successful long-term residency with Works Progress that resulted in achieving this outcome. One of the best examples of this outcome was the ongoing conversation between Works Progress, Kulture Klub Collaborative staff, and the Kulture Klub Collaborative Youth Advisory Council. Through this collaboration, professional artists were able to hear directly from homeless youth and vice versa. Members of the Youth Advisory Council and other core participants built relationships over consistent and nearly year-long interactions with Work Progress and their surrounding community. Outside of the core group, Kulture Klub Collaborative did not see a consistency in terms of relationship-building for Works Progress artists, but the program did foster relationships for Kulture Klub Collaborative staff and other homeless youth. The success of these relationships was based on metrics from surveys and conversations with participating youth. The targeted community was youth experiencing homelessness at the Youth Opportunity Center. This is a community that has a long connection to Kulture Klub Collaborative. Homeless youth experience numerous real and perceived barriers to participating in the arts and generally have very few opportunities to engage with artists. Artists like Works Progress who are interested in connecting with this community have many challenges to connecting with this community. In designing the program, Works Progress met with Kulture Klub Collaborative youth to identify themes and curiosities of the potential participants. “We spent a lot of time at the beginning of the project on activities that were designed to help us get to know Kulture Klub Collaborative staff and young people, and tried to let those relationships shape the project. It was great having Sue Pohl and Jeff Hnilicka so involved in the project and planning. Their knowledge of the community of young people we were working with, and their knowledge and experience with youth advocacy work were essential.” 2: Kulture Klub Collaborative was very successful in addressing barriers. From transportation to negotiating child care to trauma, Kulture Klub Collaborative worked diligently to mitigate youth barriers. For example, by having young parents on our Youth Opportunity Center, we were able to have our community directly shape how we addressed barriers. One metric for evaluation of addressing barriers was how many youth accessed support; i.e. bus tokens or child care stipends. To measure qualitative value of our ability to address barriers, Kulture Klub Collaborative did survey evaluations and ongoing conversations. One of the barriers this population faces (and that many young people face regardless of housing status and other economic barriers) is feeling like they are not good at art" or that art activities are not for them. One of our strategies to address this was to create activities that responded to and built upon the young peoples' interests - for example, their love of particular music or dance forms and genres. We tried to meet them where they are in that interest in the arts, and then looked for ways to build on that interest by providing opportunities for them to try their hand at creating something - without all the pressure of that "something" having to be capital "A" art. One example of this is the collaborative poetry activity. Rather than asking youth to write poems of their own, we found a way for them to journal their stream of consciousness thoughts and to use that language as the building blocks for new collaborative poems."