YMCA Programs for Arts
Traditionally known as places to learn how to do the breast stroke or make a jump shot, YMCAs are rapidly becoming the places where kids and adults learn to paint, write, sing or act. The year 2003 marks the fifth anniversary of arts and humanities as a YMCA core program.
Within only four and half years, arts programs have increased by 39 percent at Ys, and millions of dollars in program and arts facility development have been secured. There are new YMCA arts programs from coast to coast, distinguished by their ability to simultaneously support artists, community members, and cultural and other organizations.
YMCAs have actually been engaged with the arts and humanities from their earliest days, with their popular reading rooms in the 1850s, the Little Theater at the Harlem YMCA in the 1950s, and the first English as a Second Language and other adult learning classes in the 1960s. In fact, artists such as Walt Whitman, Cicely Tyson, Billy Wilder and Sidney Poitier, among many others, honed their crafts at YMCAs.
Although arts and humanities became a YMCA core program area in 1998, the seeds were sown 20 years ago when a new, accessible and innovative community-based arts program began at the West Side YMCA in New York City.
There, Jason Shinder, nationally known poet and now national director for Arts & Humanities at YMCA of the USA, founded the YMCA National Writer's Voice, a literary arts center that inspired not only the largest network of literary art centers in the country, but the idea that arts and humanities belongs at YMCA of the USA. His efforts received early, critical support from the Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation and William Bingham Foundation, among many other funders and institutions.
Novelist and playwright E.L. Doctorow, one of the many artists celebrating YMCAs' new role in the arts, calls Y leadership efforts "unprecedented, crucial, breakthrough work - nothing less than the firing up of synapses in the national mind."Doctorow is chair emeritus of the YMCA National Writer's Voice.
Today there are more than 750 YMCAs providing arts programming. Collectively, YMCAs are the nation's largest not-for-profit organization, and YMCA of the USA expects it will soon be one of the leading and most influential, if not largest, arts provider in the country for kids and adults. Considering that YMCAs serve 500,000 children in child care each year, they are especially well-positioned to lead arts programming for kids.
YMCAs' appreciation for the power of art, especially on childhood development, is strengthened by a 2002 report, Champions of Change: The Impact of Arts on Learning, from the Arts Education Partnership. The report reviews research conducted by scholars from several of America's leading universities including Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and UCLA, and reveals that children exposed to drama, music and dance may do a better job at mastering reading, writing and math than those who focus solely on academics.
Whether it's an afterschool dance class, a weekend pottery workshop or a regular book group for older adults, the YMCA is seeking to engage members in appreciating the arts as a means of building a healthy spirit, mind and body.