By Claudine K. Brown, Director, Arts Program

At the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, California, a student of ethnomusicology teaches young people of varying ethnicities to play salsa songs on West Indian steel drums. At the Harlem School of the Arts in New York City, Jewish students take jazz classes with African American and Puerto Rican students. And in Hartford, Connecticut, people from diverse communities work together to present and support cultural offerings at the Charter Oak Cultural Center, a newly renovated historic synagogue. These multidisciplinary community-based art centers, and others like them, are offering vital and innovative arts education programs that develop creative skills, promote respect for diversity, and foster cross-cultural understandings.

Since its inception, the Nathan Cummings Foundation has supported arts education programs serving the indigent, marginalized, and underserved. More recently, the Foundation has targeted small to mid-sized community-based and culturally specific institutions for support. While the entire arts community struggles to find alternatives to public funding, community-based and culturally specific arts institutions such as the East Bay Center or Charter Oak continue to face the greatest fiscal and organizational challenges with a high level of creativity. These groups collaborate with other institutions, attract large numbers of parent volunteers, and include their boards, staff, community residents, students, and representatives from other community organizations in their planning processes.

The arts groups that we support are seeking to diversify their income streams by increasing their levels of corporate and private foundationsupport, generating higher levels of individual support, strengthening their boards, and developing strategies for generating earned income. The amount of money that many of these groups are able to raise in their own communities, which consist of low- and moderate-income families,is generally minimal. Accordingly, these groups remain the neediest and, in some instances, the most essential in our arts ecosystem for they bring affordable, meaningful art experiences to those who have the least access to them.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation created the Multidisciplinary Art Center Stabilization (MACS) initiative to strengthen vital, innovative organizations that were central to their communities. All of these organizations have innovative and stabilizing management plans and leadership teams with the vision and skills to insure the institutions' survival. The Foundation awarded 11 three-year MACS grants to exceptional organizations that have a number of common characteristics: arts and education programs for at-risk youth, diverse constituencies with a history of cross-cultural collaborations, community involvement, model programs, and strong management teams.

In addition to the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, the Harlem School of the Arts, and the Charter Oak Cultural Center, MACS grantees included the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California; Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas; the Charlotte Mecklenburg Afro-American Cultural and Service Center in Charlotte, North Carolina; the Jamaica Center for the Performing and Visual Arts in Jamaica, New York; Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky; the Community Arts Project in Columbus, Ohio; Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts:Profile of a MACS Grantee

"The arts are about developing skills and learning about human expression, human perception, human creation," said Jordan Simmons, director of the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond. Richmond is one of the most economically challenged and culturally diverse communities in Northern California, yet children and adults from many different cultures harmoniously converge at the center. Emanating from one room are the staccato tappings of Mexican dancers; from another come the pulsating rhythms of African drummers; from still another we hear the plaintive sounds of a jazz ensemble while younger students practice violin down the hall. For Simmons, "the arts are a celebration of human beings behaving well. When you bring them back to behave well again and again and again, we see that people grow and develop."

For nearly 30 years, the East Bay Center has offered students rigorous training in a broad range of culturally distinct art forms, and opportunities to deepen their learning experience through in-house performances and active participation in community festivals and life-cycle events. Over 2,000 students a year study African, Mexican, and Southeast Asian music and dance, contemporary music and dance, classical ballet, instrumental and vocal jazz, choral singing, and theater and film acting and production.

The East Bay Center promotes the arts as an effective medium for nonviolent self-expression and a vehicle for social reconciliation. The center's award-winning student-written films and videos grapple with the hard issues students in the community encounter daily-from teen pregnancy to gang violence to illiteracy to drugs. The staff at the center recognizes that each generation's issues are different-as are their methods for creatively expressing their concerns. Young people are encouraged to find their own voices and to speak with authority about their life experiences. In bringing its creative resources to the community, the East Bay Center collaborates with a range of local social services agencies, including Battered Women's Alternatives, Familias Unidas, Lao Family Community Development, and the West Contra Costa Youth Service Bureau.

The East Bay Center serves its diverse audience, which includes a large immigrant population, by offering art experiences in a familiar, supportive, and broadly communal environment. From the perspective of the staff at the center, art is neither academic, exclusive nor separated from the rest of life; rather it is something that is practiced in a context of celebration and collective interaction. The center's staff, many of whom have grown up and thrived in the neighboring communities, teach culturally specific art disciplines and serve as role models for students. The East Bay Center's multiracial ensembles participate regularly in events significant to various communities, such as the Day of the Dead processions, Lao Family New Year celebrations, Juneteenth Slavery Emancipation Parades and Festivals, and Cinco de Mayo Festivals.

Most importantly, the East Bay Center's comparative study program helps students add depth to their studies and personal skills by enabling them to experience art forms and repertoire practices from different cultures. Multicultural studies, the center believes, should be a tool for understanding human beings at a common and basic level. The center also uses the arts to explore identity. Its Contemporary Dance Ensemble, for example, merges meditation, stream of consciousness writing, and improvisation to develop dance works about the emotional lives of its members.

The East Bay Center's students attest to the enjoyment and effectiveness of its teachings. Scott Nagomoto, 9, said he learned the following: "How to dance a little. How to act using strange voices." Seventeen-year-old Simmie Foster said, "I learned to communicate and interact with children and adults from various cultural backgrounds." Deanna Allen, 16, explained how the center "taught me how to be more disciplined and attentive"; and Ricardo Exquivias, 9, added his views on discipline: "I learned how to act and not to laugh when you're in a part."

The work of the staff, board, and volunteers at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts exemplifies the work of many of our grantees. In keeping with the Foundation's values and beliefs, the center shows concern for the poor, disadvantaged, and underserved; develops programs that respect the diversity of its constituency; promotes understanding across cultures; and empowers a community that has a need and desire to determine its own path.

The Art of New Technologies
As more and more upper- and middle-class families acquire home computers, their children will have a distinct advantage in a world of work that is increasingly dependent on the mastery of new technologies. The ability of the poor to catch up and develop marketable skills will become a greater challenge. Technology has had a tremendous impact on design opportunities for artists. The Brandywine Workshop, for example, sought the Foundation's support to develop a high-tech design lab in order to provide young people who were computer illiterate with viable skills in computer graphics. The first group of Brandywine students to seek summer jobs requiring computer-based graphic design skills were all hired because their training made them highly marketable.

The demand for designers with computer-based skills has made it possible for students at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild to develop web pages for other nonprofits while students at the Jamaica Center for the Performing and Visual Arts are developing computer-generated graphics for their own portfolios. These model programs, which can be replicated in other communities, will not solve the problem of insufficient computer access for the poor, but they do offer students the chance to learn the art of new technologies for self-expression and employment.