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| Supporting Creative Minds |
| The Massachusetts Cultural Council and Education |
The Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) works to ensure
that all children have access to high-quality, creative
learning experiences in school and beyond. The MCC pursues
this goal through a combination of grants, services,
and advocacy to schools, communities, and nonprofit
cultural organizations.
Grants
MCC's YouthReach
Initiative makes grants to cultural organizations
and other community groups to support in-depth arts
and cultural programs for young people in need. Launched
in 1994, YouthReach now supports more than 30 partnerships
in communities across Massachusetts. Activities take
place outside of the school, after regular school hours,
in the summer, or on weekends – in times and places
where kids are most in need of constructive activities.
YouthReach is a national model, with projects cited
for excellence by the prestigious National
Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards given by
the U.S. President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
Big
Yellow School Bus is a partnership between the Bank
of America Charitable Foundation and the Massachusetts
Cultural Council that provides $200 grants to help schools
meet the transportation costs of educational field trips
to cultural institutions and activities in Massachusetts.
In two years more than 100,000 students have experienced
museums, performances, and many other enriching sites
as a result of these grants.
MCC also supports arts education through its network
of 329 Local
Cultural Councils (LCCs) across Massachusetts. Nearly
half of the $3.2 million in LCC grants benefit arts
education. One project featured lectures by Three
Cups of Tea author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee,
Greg Mortenson, whose efforts have resulted in exemplary
humanitarian work in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Students from Dover Sherborn High School created Pakistani
influenced quilts, designed fundraising bracelets. As
a result, the students and their community became inspired
by this work of literature.
The related PASS Program
offers students access to arts and cultural programs
by offsetting costs for field trips. In FY09 more than $230,000 was distributed to schools for field trips to cultural organizations like Boston's Museum of Science, Peabody
Essex Museum in Salem, Old Sturbridge Village, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Wheelock Family Theatre, and others. This subsidized almost 30,000 tickets for young people. These experiences
are often the first of their kind for many children,
especially those from economically depressed and rural
areas.
Lastly, MCC's Cultural Investment Portfolio program sustains many high-quality education
activities that nurture creativity. Some recipients
of these grants are themselves educational institutions,
such as the New England Conservatory and North Bennet
Street School. Others serve thousands of school children
every year – such as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, Plimoth
Plantation, and Shakespeare and Company in the Berkshires.
These organizations provide extraordinary learning experiences
for young people, and many of them use MCC grants specifically
for their K-12 activities, which typically are not self-supporting.
Services
With funds from the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA), MCC offers Poetry
Out Loud, a national competition in which high school
students memorize and perform real poems and to explore
the dynamic aspects of slam poetry, spoken work, and
theatre in their English and Drama classes. The program
is run in Massachusetts by the Huntington Theatre Co.
and last year engaged more than 8,000 students.
MatchBook.org is an online cultural marketplace that brings together New England's performing and teaching artists and the people and organizations who present them. This free website features an easy-to-search directory of artists, performance spaces and presenting organizations, designed to MATCH artists with presenters that BOOK them. Since 2006, this site has provided librarians, schools, and parents with access to a range of performing and teaching artists with experience in presenting programs for young people - from children's theater groups, to Cambodian dance troupes, and Odaiko drummers.
Policy and Advocacy
The MCC has always taken an active role in shaping arts education policy. MCC was integrally involved in developing the state's arts curriculum frameworks in 1999. Today, we promote state and local policies that encourage schools, districts, and communities to make deeper investments in arts education.
MCC participates on advisory committees to the Commissioner
of Education in arts and early childhood education,
and is part of the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership,
a statewide effort to expand after-school programs.
We collaborate with Arts|Learning
to promote the value of arts education. Every two years
MCC presents the prestigious Commonwealth
Award in Education to leaders and innovators in
this field. And we provide public information on the
state of the arts in Massachusetts' schools and important
current research on the effects of arts education.
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