Bringing the Arts to Homeless Children
While most children enjoyed being at home on January 21 in observance of Martin Luther King Day, some children were at the Arvada Center starring in a play, touring art galleries, and painting with mud. Twenty-three children spent their day working with local artists as part of the Arvada Center’s Arts Day program. It was the first hands-on educational arts program in a year-long partnership between the Arvada Center and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless (CCFH). The Arvada Center is providing monthly Arts Day programming; CCFH is providing needed transportation. The vision is to help children reach their true potential through self exploration and new experiences by exposing them to the arts.
The Arvada Center has offered hands-on educational arts experiences through their Arts Day program for over 18 years. This subsidized program currently serves over 21,000 students per year, ages PreK-Adult including Title 1 schools, community groups, home school groups, families, scouts, and special needs students.
Arts Day’s numerous workshops, tours, outreach programs, plays, and special events were a perfect fit for the children at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ Renaissance school program, which provides programming for children outside of school hours, when public schools are not in session and children have no place to go. Children come from families that are in transitional housing, are homeless, or qualify as low-income families.
The partnership between CCFH and the Arvada Center offers the opportunity for children to participate in hands-on educational arts experiences and learn about the arts from local professional artists. The students who participated in the January 21 program put on a production of a revised version of The Three Little Pigs complete with a wolf allergic to pigs and animals convening for veggie lovers meetings. The play culminated with a trial where students voted on one of several possible endings. The students chose one that included community service for the wolf. The group then had lunch and toured Uzi Buzgalos’ art exhibit and learned about the visual richness of the artist’s work which celebrates hearing-impaired communication, as the artist himself is deaf. In the afternoon children put on paint shirts and created African Mud Prints by using slip/mud and tempura on cotton squares to create their own masterpieces. These pieces will be displayed at the Renaissance Children’s Center. The children were engaged and encouraged to think, question, and expand their curiosity about the world.
On President’s Day, children from the Renaissance Center enjoyed the Arvada Center children’s theater production A Year with Frog and Toad, took a hip hop class, and toured the Arvada Center’s history museum.
According to a recent article in The Rocky Mountain News, there are over 2,000 homeless children served by Jefferson County Schools. The Arvada Center and CCFH hope to continue to offer Arts Day programs to these students, and that with the support of the community this program can expand to serve more students as well as more programming. Local businesses and community members interested in supporting this program should contact Mickey McVey, Arvada Center Education Director, at 720-898-7235.