August 11, 2009
LOS ANGELES (August 11, 2009)—The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles (The Foundation) announced today a special $15,000 grant for community relief to Inner-City Arts, enabling a summer arts program to serve low-income and homeless children in the Skid Row area. The Foundation, the largest manager of charitable assets and planned giving solutions for local Jewish philanthropists, provides grants to Los Angeles-area programs that span education, social services and health care.
Running from August 3 through 21, 2009, the Summer Arts Program serves more than 200 homeless and low-income inner-city children, ages five to 15, from the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. Conducted by Inner-City Arts in collaboration with Para Los Niños, children participate in enriched summer visual and performing arts classes three days per week, four hours per day. This summer arts program helps families address one of the challenges they are facing, given the cuts to the summer school program.
Para Los Niños offers education, after-school/summer programs, and mental health and social services for disadvantaged families, approximately 90 percent of whom live below poverty level guidelines. Lacking the facilities or human resource capacity to provide organized visual or performing arts activities by trained staff, Para Los Niños collaborated with Inner-City Arts for the delivery of the program by trained professionals.
“In response to unprecedented need, we are pursuing funding opportunities to help relieve distress from the economic downtown in the general community,” said Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer Marvin I. Schotland. “We recognize that current conditions require stepping up to provide necessary assistance to complement programs that, as recently as a year or two ago, counted on funding from other sources. With those sources now eliminated, there is added imperative for organizations with financial resources, such as The Foundation, to lend support. Inner-City Arts is a wonderful organization which we have been proud to support through the years—this recent grant is in keeping with that tradition.”
“We are enormously grateful to The Foundation for delivering pivotal funding for the Summer Arts Program, which is of particular urgency this year,” said Cynthia Harnisch, president and CEO of Inner-City Arts. “With its budget crisis, Los Angeles Unified School District has canceled almost all of its summer school programs, and most nonprofit organizations have had to cut or reduce the scope and capacity of their summer programs. Without these school-based and extracurricular opportunities, children living in impoverished urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles’ Central City East, including Skid Row, are at risk of crime and violence on neighborhood streets.”
Classes are led by highly trained professionals in ceramics, drama, music, dance, visual arts and digital photography in a nurturing, secure environment, according to Sharyn Church, deputy director of Inner-City Arts. Children learn about each art form, work together to build collaborative art projects, and share their creations. The program positively reinforces children’s language development, cognitive and artistic abilities, social skills, behavior and creative expression. This helps to ensure the healthy development of participants and also enriches community life through student performances and exhibitions.
About Inner-City Arts
Inner-City Arts is a learning oasis in the heart of Skid Row where professional artists teach students in a real studio environment. The nonprofit organization serves the city’s most at-risk students at no cost to the students. Inner-City Arts’ programs are regularly studied and supported by academic research teams throughout the country. In addition, Inner-City Arts contributes to the country’s leading education research by collaborating with researchers at UCLA, Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Education and other educational thought leaders. For more information, please visit
www.inner-cityarts.org.
About The Foundation
Established in 1954, the Jewish Community Foundation is the largest manager of charitable assets and the leader in planned giving solutions for Greater Los Angeles Jewish philanthropists. The Foundation currently manages assets of $690 million (as of Dec. 31, 2008) and ranks among the ten largest Los Angeles foundations. In 2008, The Foundation and its nearly 1,200 donors distributed more than $65 million in grants to hundreds of organizations with programs that span the range of philanthropic giving. For more information, please visit www.jewishfoundationla.org.