NOTE FROM BILL IVEY
Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts has a vision, as well as a mandate, to ensure that all Americans have access to the arts. Recognizing that the creative arts play a particularly vital role in the social, intellectual, and emotional development of our children, the Arts Endowment is committed to reaching out to America's children through innovative programs, such as those we are honoring with the Coming Up Taller Award.
These awards recognize outstanding programs that reach children during the most vulnerable time of their days-after school, weekends, and summers. The Coming Up Taller Award winners are set apart, too, by the professionalism and dedication of those countless individuals who run and support the program. Coming Up Taller programs engage teams of professional artists who serve as role models and mentors and provide guidance and encouragement to budding young talent. They involve dedicated program administrators and staff, who provide the facilities, materials and services to support the program. They enlist cultural and civic organizations that sponsor and host the activities. They call upon community leaders in schools, service organizations, local government and businesses to support the program with their time and money. But, most important, the success of these programs is due to the children, parents, families, and friends who make the arts come alive, who themselves actually become a part of America's living cultural heritage.
Children are our nation's most precious natural resource. They are our future and America's hope. Each child deserves the chance to develop to his or her full potential. Each child deserves the chance to dream. Each child deserves, in the words of Willie Reale, Artistic Director of The 52nd Street Project in New York City, "to take a bow and come up taller."
The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to sponsor this annual awards program, and will continue to work with communities to support arts programs for children. To the arts community, the recipients of the Coming Up Taller Awards represent individual successes. To America, those individual successes mean healthier children, a safer nation, and a more secure future for all of us.
