Operating Support
ACHF Arts Access
Weave arts programming into the fabric of community life at homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and out-of-school time programs in community centers. Build and sustain partnerships that integrate art into community life at thirty agencies each year. Evaluate the success of the partnerships through biannual surveys of the staff in the facilities that host our programs. We evaluated the success of our partnerships through biannual surveys of the staff in the facilities that hosted our programs. 100% of our partner agency staff said Free Arts provides a valuable service to our facility/group. And 100% of our partner agency staff said I would recommend the Free Arts Weekly Mentorship Program to others. When asked Why do you involve the youth at your site in the Free Arts Weekly mentorship program? there were many positive responses, including this one: Free Arts provides a unique opportunity for our clients to have exposure to the arts which is typically an area that our clients struggle with in their mainstream educational setting. Art is therapeutic and gives our clients an outlet for emotional expression. Art also allows our clients to take risks and work on self-regulation in a non-threatening manner. 2: Expand participation in the arts to people of all ages, ethnicities, and abilities. Reach 4,000 young people with our blend of arts activities and mentorship. In order to bring art into the lives of 4,000 young people, recruit and train over 250 community members to lead art projects and act as mentors for these young people. Evaluate artistic growth and experience of youth with biannual surveys of the staff in the facilities that host our programs, as well as the young people and volunteers that participate. We evaluated artistic growth and experience of youth in our programs with biannual surveys of the staff in the facilities that hosted our programs, as well as the young people and volunteers that participated. Those evaluations yielded the following results: 94% of our volunteer art mentors stated that the youth in our programs developed new artistic skills. 95% of the staff at our partner agencies said that the youth had a safe environment in which to express themselves. The vast majority of both partner staff (79%) and our volunteer art mentors (79%) felt that the youth we worked with had increased self-esteem thanks to our Free Arts programs.
Our first goal was to weave arts programming into the fabric of community life at homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and out-of-school time programs in community centers. Outcome one was to build and sustain 30 social service agency partnerships in order to accomplish that integration of arts programming within their communities. Our actual outcome was that we built and sustained partnerships at 29 homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and out-of-school time programs in community centers. Youth at these partner agencies received access to arts programming through our weekly mentorship program and our Free Arts Days. 2: Our second goal was to expand participation in the arts to people of all ages, ethnicities, and abilities. We set a goal to reach 4,000 young people with our blend of arts activities and mentorship. In order to bring art into the lives of 4,000 young people, we set out to recruit and train over 250 community members to lead art projects and act as mentors for the young people in our programs. Our actual outcomes are that we reached 4,143 youth. We recruited and trained 497 volunteer art mentors. This goal also aimed at serving the under-served in terms of ethnic and economic diversity. The youth served by Free Arts programs in this period were 69% African American, 13% Caucasian, 6% Asian, 6% Hispanic, 5% multiple-race, and 1% American Indian.
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