Art Buddies kicks off 2015 with advances toward expansion!
Scott Mikesh, President/Executive Director
As we gear up to start recruiting mentors for spring Art Buddies in Minneapolis, we're excited to report great strides toward expanding Art Buddies to St. Paul this year. Prospective schools are now being vetted to identify the most suitable St. Paul program partner for our fall 2015 season, to be announced this spring.
Special thanks to Program Director, Stephanie Vagle, and members of our Advisory Board for researching and working with those in the St. Paul school district who helped us identify potential program partners.
While there is no shortage of children who could benefit from Art Buddies, our charitable mission is to provide an empowering arts learning and creative enrichment experience for kids who might not otherwise have the means or access to art programs.
Art Buddies activities also require sufficient space to host our large creating sessions that involve up to 80 people (up to 40 children working one-on-one with up to 40 creative adults). Long-term storage for our large collection of art supplies and creative works is also required.
Fortunately, we have identified schools that could be a great fit, and are equally excited to offer Art Buddies after school for their 3rd-5th grade students next fall!
We are truly grateful for the hundreds of individuals, businesses and organizations that support Art Buddies each year, especially the many wonderful creative volunteers who provide the magic of mentoring by sharing their time and talents with kids who need them.
Here's to another great year of empowering more underprivileged children to discover their creative potential!
Please join our mailing list to receive the latest Art Buddies updates and volunteer opportunities: http://www.artbuddies.org/join-our-email-list.
Art Buddy Spotlight: Reginaldo Reyes, Mentor
10 Lessons the Arts Teach
At Art Buddies, we use the power of creativity, self-expression through artistic methods, and one-on-one mentoring to change children’s lives. The significant impact of the kind of arts learning provided by Art Buddies is highlighted here by the late Elliot Eisner, acclaimed professor of Art and Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education:
The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
The arts make vivid that fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
The arts enable use to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.