Mission: CHANGE Arts aims to make arts access limitless for students in underserved areas, thereby nurturing the desire for lifelong experiences with the arts. CHANGE wants to see the arts-going demographic become as diverse as new work aims to be, in pursuit of personal, communal, and systemic change. By Challenging Hurdles to Access and Nurturing Growth and Empathy, we can CHANGE.
Why Now?
We recognize that the arts are only marketed and available to those who are already arts aware, causing skewed participation that translates to an overall lack of diversity, from patron to performer.
This issue of arts awareness starts at the school level. In New York City, perhaps the cultural capital of United States, public schools are not meeting their own arts requirements. As reported in the NYC DOE Arts in Schools Annual Report (1584 total schools surveyed; 87% responded to the survey):
School partnerships with local arts organizations drops down from 437 in elementary schools to only 154 in middle schools—most partnerships are with Visual Arts organizations.
Only 34% of non-arts teachers participated in arts-based professional developments. This low number indicates that the arts are perceived as an “extra” in non-arts disciplines, when what we know from learning science and neuroscience, the highly effective concepts of interleaving and perceptual learning, call on the application of the different art forms as a structure to challenge our thinking, help us to better retain information, and make us more discerning learners. The arts dare us to personalize information—not just memorize it!
NYC vs. National Discrepancies Between Artistic Disciplines (national %s from Americans for the Arts Arts Education Navigator):
Music: 886 full-time Music teachers, 171 cultural partnerships, 6% of elementary schools in the U.S. lack Music!
Visual Art: 1132 full-time Visual Art teachers, 219 cultural partnerships, 17% of elementary schools in the U.S. lack the Visual Arts!
Dance: 215 full-time Dance teachers, 175 cultural partnerships, 97% of elementary schools in the U.S. lack Dance!
Theater: 198 full-time Theater teachers, 182 cultural partnerships, 96% of elementary schools in the U.S. lack Theater!
The Founding Inquiries of CHANGE Arts:
What happens when we invite everyone through the doors of our studios and stages?
How do we cultivate what Mark Schubart calls the “passionate amateur,” people with “a want to hear, a want to see”?
What happens when investigative learning is applied to high-quality arts experiences?
