Education Through the Arts
The Village of Arts and Humanities

The Youth Theater performs We Wear the Mask throughout Philadelphia.

It reads almost like a children's story-the tale of a sculpture garden that transformed not only the abandoned land it occupied but also the people who lived around it: "The sculpture garden grew into programs, festivals, arts commissions, community and youth theater productions, entrepreneurial training, publications, and workshops. The garden became a village. The Village has converted more than 55 lots into community art parks and more gardens...."

This place is not Oz, but blighted North Philadelphia. The writer is not L. Frank Baum, but Philip Horne of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. The story, however, is very much a children's story that begins nearly 15 years ago with a Chinese-born artist named Lily Yeh. Today her vision has become The Village of Arts and Humanities, whose Education Through the Arts program provides year-round, after-school, weekend, and summer programs for more than 2,500 youth.

Education Through the Arts has three linked parts: outreach to other organizations, open workshops, and a Core Leadership Program. The open workshops, regularly scheduled after school and on Saturdays, are often youngsters' point of entry to the Core Leadership Program, which annually enrolls 250 children, ages 6-12, and up to 35 teens, ages 13-18. The younger participants, known as "fledglings," learn to paint, dance, sculpt, act, write, and garden. They also learn to be on time, work with others, eat nutritious foods, and do their schoolwork well. Fifty-seven percent showed improvement on their report cards last year. In other words, North Philadelphia's fledglings are learning to fly.

Meanwhile, their older siblings and friends are pre-paring to soar. Core Leadership offers them workshops, including visual arts, dance, creative writing, conflict resolution, and sexual health awareness, plus field trips to events and performances, and entrepreneurial work/study. And the teens like them: ninety percent re-enroll after their first semester. Of the 23 teens in the Core Program, five are in their second year, seven in their third.

Clearly, what they are finding in The Village is the help they need to write their own success stories.