April 2016 Newsletter: Update on Our Amazing Partners

Turnaround Arts is blessed with 18 national partners and counting. Some of these partners provide needed resources to our schools such as supplies, equipment, or professional development. Some train our teachers in new techniques or approaches. And some stand behind us with funding, helping us to help our schools.

In each upcoming newsletter, we will feature the generosity and impact of several of these important organizations to give you a look under the Turnaround Arts hood. In the end, it is only through collaboration at the national level, local level, and within our schools that we succeed. Without our partners, Turnaround Arts would not be.

If you ever get to visit our headquarters at the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) in Washington, DC, you will see that we are nestled in a building alongside two of our closest government allies, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Long-standing siblings of PCAH, these two agencies have been staunch supporters and advisors of Turnaround Arts, providing operational support and funding to the program since its inception in 2011.

The NEA is a federal agency that provides leadership and grants to the nonprofit arts community throughout the United States to support excellence in the arts, including arts education. They are also a key partner for PCAH, acting as part of our advisory group and funding key positions on our staff, including our executive director, providing us leadership and stability.

The NEH, also right down the hall from PCAH, supports cultural institutions that uphold the humanities such as museums, libraries, universities, and individuals through grants and other honors. Recently, Turnaround Arts and the NEH have been exploring ways to strategically use in our schools the wealth of educational materials that the NEH has created over the years. The NEH generously shared beautiful laminated “Picturing America” poster sets for all of our schools, who are using them to practice techniques of careful observation and inference that they learned at our summer retreat last year. The NEH has also funded a project with the Jacob Burns Film Center and the Brooklyn Historical Society, who have developed an integrated curriculum that uses one of the films in the NEH’s “Created Equal” film series to teach students about civil rights history, media literacy, and film making.  The pilot project is launching this month in select Bridgeport and Brooklyn schools, and will be implemented across our network next year.