Melissa Bailey Photo
Laoise King
Thanks to an anonymous $150,000 donation to the United Way of Greater New Haven, several local nonprofit organizations are bringing arts-related programming into five area schools. The funds, which were received this past summer, were earmarked for “arts-related programming in the five Boost! schools” and came with the condition that participating schools would determine what services best suited their needs, according to Laoise King, the United Way of Greater New Haven’s vice-president of education initiatives. The donation also came with the stipulation that the vast majority of the $150,000 would go toward partnering with local artists, King said.
The Boost! program, which is a collaboration between the United Way of Greater New Haven, City of New Haven, and New Haven Public Schools, was launched in early 2010. During the course of that year, five local schools — the Augusta Lewis Troup School, Barnard Environmental Studies School, Clinton Avenue School, Metropolitan Business Academy, and Wexler-Grant Community School — were studied with regard to the types of extra-academic support would benefit each.
In early 2011, the results of that study process were made available to area nonprofit organizations. Participating schools were paired with various agencies in the spring of that year, and, in the fall of this year, the Boost! program was implemented.
When the above-mentioned $150,000 was made available this past summer, the United Way reached out to local arts-related nonprofit organizations and ultimately “were able to pair all five of the (Boost!) schools with local drama therapists” through the Foundation for the Arts and Trauma, King said.
Through the “Arts Innovation Fund” established with the $150,000 anonymous gift, the Clinton Avenue School has partnered with Young Audiences Arts for Learning Connecticut’s Hip Hop Dimensions program, the Augusta Lewis Troup School has partnered with Fortunato Puppets and the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop, and the Wexler-Grant Community School has partnered with the Elm Shakespeare Company, Collective Consciousness Theatre, and New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
The $150,000 Arts Innovation Fund, which was divided equally between each of the five Boost! schools, has “leveraged resources … bringing back sometimes 10 times the investment” in terms of the services provided to the schools by the local arts organizations, King said.
The United Way, she said, is working with the schools and arts organizations to identify how the partnerships can be sustained beyond what the $150,000 will allow. And therein lies the financial challenge going forward.
In designing the Boost! program, King said, “we wanted to make systemic changes” in the school district, and “we didn’t want [the resulting program] to be dependent on a funder.”
Still, King said, “without this fund, these schools and these nonprofits would never have known each other or met each other.”