ART START
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Mission Statement
Art Start uses the creative process to nurture the voices, hearts, and minds of historically marginalized youth, offering a space for them to imagine, believe, and represent their creative vision for their lives and communities.
About This Cause
In the Spring of 1991, a handful of artists got together with youth experiencing homelessness to make art in New York City. For almost 30 years, Art Start has become an award-winning, nationally recognized model for using the creative arts to transform young people's lives. Through consistent workshops with long-term partners, including youth organizations, schools, alternative sentencing programs, and residences for youth and families experiencing homelessness, art becomes the starting point of a larger life process, and the start of larger conversations about the future of our communities. Art Start uses a student-centered approach to education. Our workshops instill in our youth the confidence to appreciate who they already are and what they innately have to offer the world; then, to think critically, ask important questions, and pursue meaningful opportunities in life – against all odds. Our creative workshops are structured to support consistency, build resilience, and provide direction to youth going through a time of challenging transition. We provide weekly workshops in Visual Arts, Food Justice/Cooking, Gardening and Performing Arts including Music, Dance and Theater. We also support youth with creative and professional development, through our Emerging Artists program, supporting artists of all genres between the ages of 14 and 20. While encouraging personal development on many levels, by using creative projects that focus on the outlet for expression, youth are free to build trusting relationships with our Teaching Artists naturally, learning to open up and bond in ways not possible through the social service or traditional education model. And because Art Start comes to the youth, both in terms of location and circumstance, we’re able to reach them despite the physical and psychological walls built to keep them closed off from the rest of the world. Though they face many obstacles, our youth have dreams that far surpass their circumstances. They yearn to be participants and make meaningful contributions. Art Start teaches youth how to survive their own lives with confidence, creativity and hope, and transform a time of instability and transition into a time for personal growth and development. Word about Art Start’s success has also received national media attention. Features about Art Start have been portrayed on: The Oprah Winfrey Show, Bravo’s documentary Stories of Arts for Change, a mini-documentary by two-time Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple and the 2003 CBS special, “Fulfilling the Dream.” In 2009, The Sundance Channel debuted The Hip Hop Project, a feature-length documentary about Art Start’s award- winning music program for teens in crisis. Additional features about Art Start have been published in the New York Daily News, The New York Times, MSNBC’s The Griot, Fox 5’s Good Day Street Talk, and radio stations 107.3 Lite FM, as well as National Pubic Radio. Art Start has received the following accolades: President’s Service Award Presented by President Bill Clinton, 1991 National Endowment for the Arts Award, 2001 Non-Profiteer of the Year Awarded to Art Start Executive Director, Johanna De Los Santos, 2010