Partners in Arts Participation

The Health and Wellness theme was selected from ideas generated by the youth participants and their families. Partnerships for the Summer Explorers Program activities centered on cooking, gardening and science. Artist residencies were established with Artists who taught youth stilting, drumming, mask making, costume design and creation. This balance between physical stilt walking and the planning and precision needed to construct a puppet provided interesting, diverse, and artistic learning experiencess for our youth. Evaluation methods: Meeting participation, event participation, planning and implementation of the project. To evaluate the succes of the Artists partnerships included: youth project completions, participation, organization and planning to support the first Heritage Park community parade on National Night Out 2013, program attendance, increased positive attitude development by youth, increased parent engagement, and youth presentations at the Minnesota State Fair. Throughout the project youth were provide venues for fostering creativity and exploring a variety of art forms, including puppetry, stilting, drumming, mask and costume making. Introduce youth to accessible, low-cost materials for creating puppets, costumes, drums, stilts, and masks such as recycled materials and natural materials and dyes made from vegetables grown form the youth community garden.