As stated in our mission, Arts For All offers accessible artistic opportunities to children in the New York City area who face socio-economic, physical, or emotional barriers to exploring the arts. Through Arts For All, professional artists work with youth organizations to build self-confidence, self-expression, teamwork, resilience, and creativity in children.
While there is an obvious goal for the students who participate in our workshops to become better artists, our workshops are not centered on “art for arts’ sake”. It is through art that we work to grow our 5 Core Values – self-confidence, self-expression, teamwork, resilience, and creativity – in these students. And where there are physical artworks and dance numbers that show how a student’s art capabilities have grown – how does one know if their self-confidence has increased? Or their ability to work as a part of a team? At the beginning of each semester, our Teaching Artists select certain Core Values that they home in on within their lessons to help their students’ Core Values grow, and throughout the semester they assess how their classrooms are progressing with a final result percentage at the end.
In School Year 2024-25, we saw high levels of growth in core values, based on data taken from across our programs. On average, we recorded students increasing 25% in Self-Expression, 36% in Self-Confidence, 43% in Creativity, 33% in Teamwork, and 40% in Resilience.
A few specific examples are given below:
Core Value: Self-Confidence
At Renaissance Charter School in Elmhurst, Teaching Artist Brynne worked with a first-grade classroom through our Literacy Through the Arts program. In a routine interactive warm up, Brynne gave students the option to input their ideas for a game where we saw a 50% increase in self-confidence.
Core Value: Self-Expression
In this program, Teaching Artist Nicole Hogsett worked with a first-grade classroom at PS 76 to enhance their literacy and social emotional skills. Nicole gave the students a lot of choices to create their artwork in expressive, meaningful and unique ways. We saw a 38% increase in self-expression.
Core Value: Teamwork
At PS 194, Teaching Artist Stephanie Mandra-Martinez worked with a Kindergarten classroom through our Literacy Through the Arts program to combine literacy enrichment and theatre instruction. In this class, she combined read alouds with writing activities to enhance their phonics work. In doing so, they needed to share a lot of materials. We saw a 33% increase in teamwork as students were able to work well together and be empathetic.
Core Value: Resilience
At Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, Teaching Artist Briget Villanueva worked with a second-grade class to collaborate with their Mandarin instruction to pair visual arts with their language/culture curriculum. In this class, we saw a 70% increase in resilience as students were able to advocate for themselves and continue their artwork when they were struggling.
Core Value: Creativity
At PS 243, Teaching Artist Nami Kagami worked with a Kindergarten classroom to improve their fine motor skills and express themselves through a series of engaging dance workshops through our Artistic Residency Program. In this class, we saw a 53% increase of creativity as students were able to demonstrate shapes and movements that were unique to each individual.
