Arts & Community Wellness Initiative

Old Town School of Folk Music is thrilled to share details of one of the most significant outreach efforts in the School’s history, the new Arts & Community Wellness Initiative stakeholders in Chicago’s south side Englewood neighborhood. This initiative addresses social change, violence reduction, community development and youth leadership through the arts.

During the summer of 2016, we were excited to pilot our first Englewood-based classes at I Grow Chicago at 64th and Honore, which were followed up with ten weeks of classes in the fall. Working with 17 young people, aged 15-25, classes focused on hip-hop, songwriting and African drumming, with an emphasis on self-esteem building and conflict resolution. All of the participants have suffered serious social and personal trauma; our initiative strives to provide opportunities for taking successful action on their own behalf.

A lot of anecdotes accumulate in ten weeks. The girl who never missed a drumming class because “I can get all my anger out on that drum.” The boy who was caught in a gunfight on a bus, and while huddled down on the floor between seats wondered about how he might express his feelings that moment in a poem. The withdrawn girl who received some special coaching because she was going for her first-ever job interview – what to wear, how to present herself, how to look her prospective boss in the eye – and managed to land the job. I Grow’s founder Robbin Carroll, commented that Tuesdays – the day of Old Town School’s music classes there – every student showed up. Asked about how the arts programs relate to health, she said, “Well, I know when they’re drumming they aren’t shooting at anybody, and no one is shooting at them.”

As we begin 2017, our Old Town School classes continue at I Grow and in coming months we will open OTS programs at two more Englewood partners: Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) and Holy Cross Hospital. A community advisory council is in formation, including prospective partners, business leaders and artists. In July, we’re planning a summer institute on trauma-informed arts learning, engaging Englewood “arts activators,” teaching artists, and community partners to chart the way forward.

Some recent donations of note for this Initiative include Remo, Inc, which donated $10,000-worth of drums and promised more to come. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded the School a $100,000 “Creativity Connects” grant (one of only twenty), and we received a commitment of $150,000 from the Paul Angell M. Family Foundation. Major support has also been provided by Kenneth and Barbara Kaufman, Don McLellan and Martina Keller, the Tomford-Grossman family, and Lauren and David Grossman. The City of Chicago’s Planning Office is now considering involvement.

Old Town School’s Executive Director Bau Graves and Engagement Director Uday Joshi attended a national conference of community-focused arts programs in November. They saw a lot of inspiring work being done all over the country. But all of it is work done on a shoestring serving small, specific communities. The Arts & Community Wellness template that we are evolving aspires to take this effort to scale that is absent from the public arts and culture field, linking arts education directly to social service, health and community development strategies. Old Town School itself is testing, assessing and evolving to build our own capacity to pursue this work at a meaningful level.

Our Strategic Plan and our Board’s strong backing commit the School to pursuing this important work into the foreseeable future, making it central to the School’s mission and vision.