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Raising the Barre and Stretching the Canvas: Implementing High Quality Arts Programming in a National Youth-Serving Organization
As part of an ongoing, multimillion-dollar Wallace Foundation initiative to improve and expand arts learning opportunities for young people, the Foundation, in partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, developed the Youth Arts Initiative to deliver otherwise inaccessible high-quality arts programs to low-income urban tweens in an after-school setting. Boys & Girls Clubs of American launched a the pilot in February 2014 to see if a multidisciplinary Youth Serving Organization (YSO), working with a small number of its affiliates, could implement a high-quality art skill-development program modeled after out-of-school time programs focused primarily on the arts. This report is the evaluation of the project.
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Mapping Opportunity Youth Needs in the US
In 2016, the International Youth Foundation, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, launched (Re)Connecting Youth: Exchanging Global Lessons. The two-year initiative seeks to identify and share innovative global approaches for increasing youth connection with practitioners, policymakers, and funders across the U.S. Ultimately, its goal is to foster learning and energize support for holistic solutions aimed at providing millions of youth in the U.S. who are not in work or school with opportunities to lead healthy, productive lives. This is the report of the first phase of the project.
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Afterschool Programs That Follow Evidence-Based Practices to Promote Social and Emotional Development Are Effective
Based on the study of effective OST programs by Durlak and Weissberg, this article describes the SAFE model of program design that supports quality programming.
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A Place for the Arts: Lessons Learned from an Afterschool Art Experience with Reclaimed Materials
Unencumbered by restrictions surrounding formal classrooms, this article describes how afterschool programs can offer exploratory art activities that support young learners’ artistic creation, arts viewing, and aesthetic experiences.
