Collective Learning and Leadership Advances Arts Education
With growing understanding of how the arts positively affect young people, building broad awareness about different ways to deliver impactful arts education is crucial. This brings us to our fourth key strategy for advancing arts education: Learning and Leadership.
As a collective impact initiative, we engage many partners in achieving our shared goals. We therefore can shine a light on promising practices that energize young minds, connect people and organizations who are committed to the work, and uplift community voices to help guide the effort. This requires:
- Building networks for collaboration
- Sharing exemplary models
- Igniting thought leadership
- Taking action
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For the last 20 years, we’ve proudly shared resources from and for our partners in the field. We help connect educators and advocates across LA County who are passionate about young people growing up with the arts. And today, we also aim to engage leaders who are representative of the communities they serve in achieving the goals of the new Arts Ed Blueprint.
We know this work doesn't happen in a vacuum and that no single agency or organization can do it alone. The bigger the tent, the more we can achieve. That is why we prioritize collaboration, active listening, and collective action -- to move forward together.
Read more below about how the Arts Ed Collective promotes learning and leadership among stakeholders to advance arts education across LA County.
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Arts Education Builds Critical Thinking and Social Consciousness
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Last spring, KCET released a special Arts Education episode of their Artbound documentary series. Commissioned by the Arts Ed Collective Funders Council and developed in collaboration with the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, the award-winning Artbound: Arts Education presents strong examples of how the arts help young people understand the world around them.
Using the arts to counter negative stereotypes perpetuated in the media is one way youth can make their voices heard and shift dominant (and often inaccurate) social narratives. Luis-Genaro Garcia, an artist, former LAUSD high school teacher, and now a professor at California State University, Sacramento, describes one promising approach that encourages students to put forward their perceptions of community through tortilla art. Ravi Rajan, President of the California Institute of the Arts, raises the question of how to best prepare young people to recognize and decode truth from fiction.
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Collective Leadership Increases the Impact of Shared Investments in Arts Education
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It takes ongoing commitment and action from many different influencers and decision-makers to make measurable progress toward ensuring the arts are part of every child’s growth and development. Since 2004, the Arts Ed Collective Funders Council has been a critical partner, working hand-in-hand with the Department of Arts and Culture to deliver significant gains for arts education in LA County.
Members of the Funders Council push for broad-scale systems change that will allow all young people to grow up with the arts, inside and outside the classroom. This means that in addition to funding local non-profit arts organizations that provide arts education in schools and communities, Funders Council members also collaborate with one another, the Department of Arts and Culture, school districts, and other County agencies to leverage and extend the impact of their investments.
Together they serve as essential thought partners who help set direction, align strategies, guide implementation, and prioritize allocations of their shared investments to directly impact those who have historically had the least access to the arts.
In the year ahead, three paid Youth Advisors will join the Funders Council to ensure our strategies are co-designed by young people with lived experience. Join us in welcoming Maritza Lopez, Autumn Taylor, and Rudy Torres as our first Funders Council Youth Advisors. Learn more.
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Spotlights on Learning and Leadership
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Art of Leadership participants envision, develop, experiment with, and activate innovative approaches for increasing equity and access in arts education.
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We are proud to highlight these promising practices that advance the goals of the new Arts Ed Blueprint. We hope that by uplifting these exemplary models, we can increase collaboration and expand the coalition working to increase young people’s access to arts education.
- For more than 15 years, we have brought together Arts Coordinators from LA County school districts to share, learn, and collaborate. This year, we co-hosted bi-monthly gatherings in partnership with the LA County Office of Education (LACOE) and Arts for LA to create a supportive space where school district leaders could exchange ideas, resources and successful approaches for expanding arts instruction to reach all students, in all their schools.
- Since 2017, we have brought together over 200 emerging and established leaders to develop and activate new strategies for achieving our shared goals. Through both the Arts Ed Innovation Lab and the Art of Leadership professional development series, we’ve convened diverse stakeholders, promoted lateral mentorship, nourished collaboration between communities, and expanded a network of leaders who are representative of the communities they serve.
- The I.D.E.A. Wave CoLab was sparked by collaboration among participants in the 2019 Art of Leadership program. This spring and fall, we are pleased to share resources developed by the I.D.E.A. Wave CoLab through two workshop series focused on building equity, diversity, inclusion, healing, and anti-racism in organizations that provide arts education for young people.
- The new Creative Wellbeing Curriculum Guide was designed to build an understanding of the Creative Wellbeing approach and to inspire educators, mental health practitioners, and teaching artists to brainstorm, design, and facilitate their own healing-centered arts activities. The guide was developed collaboratively by paid youth content advisors, teaching artists, and partners from artworxLA, the Arts for Healing and Justice Network, Office of Child Protection, Department of Mental Health, and Department of Arts and Culture.
- Over the next seven months, we will bring together an intergenerational group of 40 youth, educators, artists, and cultural practitioners as the Arts-Based Healing-Centered Engagement Working Group. Facilitated by Flourish Agenda, this working group will co-develop a framework to support the field’s broader understanding and implementation of arts-based healing-centered engagement.
- This spring, we partnered with the Arts for Healing and Justice Network (artworxLA, Jail Guitar Doors, No Easy Props, and Street Poets) to present a live webinar on Healing Through the Arts as part of LACOE’s All In: Safe and Welcoming Schools professional development series. The hands-on session provided tools for integrating the Creative Wellbeing approach in classrooms.
- Each year, we partner with Southern California Grantmakers to co-present Arts Education Forums that help build awareness within the philanthropic community about the importance and value of arts education for healthy youth development, within and outside of schools.
- We are committed to ensuring the Arts Ed Collective shares power with, and is informed by, young people who represent those most impacted by its work – particularly those with lived experience in the public education, juvenile justice, and foster care systems. In 2019, 23 youth leaders from across LA County served on the Arts Ed Collective Youth Advisory Council to contribute strategies to the new Arts Ed Blueprint. Today, Youth Advisory Council alumni and other youth representatives remain actively engaged in the Arts Ed Collective by serving as grant panelists, program consultants, content advisors, and guest speakers.
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Join others from across our ecosystem to build new connections for collaboration.
- July 8 - Join Flourish Agenda as they host the final session of the Healing Centered Engagement Foundations Series.
- August 3,10, 17 - Attend the Creative Wellbeing Summer Renewal Retreat, co-presented as a strategic collaboration between Wellbeing for LA and the Creative Wellbeing partnering agencies (Department of Arts and Culture, Office of Child Protection, Department of Mental Health, and the Arts for Healing and Justice Network).
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