Ikea Event!

A couple weekends ago I had the opportunity to lead my first event ever with Free Arts! We have a very great partnership with Ikea and this summer we have been conducting various community outreach events at their store. Our last one for the summer was the "Back to School" event. Our main goal was to just spread the word about what Free Arts does and raise some awareness. We did this by having a table right by the front where we had frames donated by Ikea for the children to decorate. Then, the volunteers and I would talk with the parents about what Free Arts does. Free Arts also had a youth art display that was opening up that weekend in Ikea, which can now be seen in the cafe on the second floor of the store.

I was pretty nervous to run my first event! I never had that type of experience before, but it was a blast! I really enjoyed getting to organize everything and plan how the displays would look and working with the volunteers.

All in all, I felt like the event was a huge success. We received back quite a few interest forms, gave out all our brochures and even received some donations! We had about 140+ youth attend the event that day. It was awesome to get this hands on experience and be able to get a small taste of event planning.

A change of pace...

Well now that MAC Camp is *officially* wrapped up, I have the opportunity to explore different departments and areas of Free Arts. I am really excited and thankful for these upcoming opportunities because these projects are exposing me to different situations that I may not be most comfortable with, but eager to learn about. Here are some examples of my up coming projects.

Professional Artist Series:

The program manager of the Professional Artist Series (PAS) approached me with a project to help prepare for PAS this upcoming year. Re-Creative Art Center offered to pay the artist themselves if Free Arts uses them in their program, saving Free Arts a lot of money. However, this is drastically changing the current schedule that was almost inplace for PAS, so my job is to call all the facility sites and discuss with them about the different artists we are offering and their interest in them, time frame that works for the artist to come, population of the youth at the facility, etc. I take this information and then enter it into a spreadsheet on excel. From this, the program manager can incorporate them into the schedule for this upcoming year.

Mentor Coach Proposal:

I am currently in the process of helping the Weekly Mentor program manager develop a proposal for a new program she is trying to create: the Mentor Coaching program. Mentor Coaches are going to serve as a resource for current weekly mentors and offer trainings in different areas like creative problem solving, group management, etc. It is really exciting because I never had to develop a proposal before! I also get to assist in helping develop the logistics of the program, such as what it will look like, the what exactly they will do, how they will complete there job. It's really exciting to be in the middle of trying to develop this very new program! It's a cool experience and even though I have never done anything like this before, I love doing things like this so I'm really excited!

Marketing:

I have yet to find out exactly what my job will be in marketing, but I will either be helping out with online campaigns, planning 3rd party events, or on one of the biggest fundraisers: Pallete of Homes Tour.

IKEA Event:

The last major project I'm working on is assisting the volunteer and outreach coordinator with the IKEA event that will be held on July 18th at the store. This event serves as a community awareness event. While I joined on this project quite late in the game, I still get to do things like follow up with volunteers, addressing concerns with the event as they arrive with the head contact over at IKEA, etc.

That is what my next month will look like! I know there are few other things that I'm going to be doing, but this is the majority of it for now!

Evaluations

This week I had to go through the camper evaluations and add up numbers of how the children ranked each of the classes and what they would change from the camp. I also had to pull out some interesting and/or exciting quotes and put them into a document that Free Arts can use on a later date. Here are some of the quotes on what the youth had to say about MAC Camp:

"This camp is a fun place to come and meet new people. It is also something you
can learn good things at"

“My favorite thing about camp was meeting people who understand me and who I am.”

“It was awesome, whoohoo”

“I would change instead of 1 week of camp make it for 2 or more!”

Photos from MAC Camp

Kim and a camper making origami in Asian Arts
Christa showing a camper how to weave a basket

Camper hard at work on her boutique

The wonderful and amazing volunteers!

Jamie and a camper with her cigar box she made

"Free Arts Kids, Everywhere.."

The past two weeks have been a crazy/busy time for Free Arts! We had our two Multicutural Arts Camp (MAC) sessions over the past two weeks. Session one was for high school students and session two was for middle school students. We had about 65 students total for each camp!

The camp is a week long summer art camp in which our partner facilities (i.e. the group homes, shelters, residential treatment centers, etc) bring some of their youth to participate in it. The camp is designed to give the youth a fun and exciting summer camp experience that they may not have otherwise! The camp is entirely free for the kids thanks to donors who help sponsor the camp.

My role at the camp was to be a volunteer in one of the groups of children and also help the camp director with whatever she needed. This usually includes getting together more name tags, doing volunteer reminder calls, picking up things from the office, etc.

Let me just say that I have worked many summer camps, and this was by far one of the most challenging, but easily the most unique and fun camps ever! I was pretty nervous working with the youth since I'm not used to working with older youth, but it was so amazing! The youth got to participate in five different workshops each day: recycled music, Latin dance, world arts, Asian arts, and junk art. It was so much fun! They were all really engaged in all of the workshops and there really was something for everyone. At the end of the week, they got to put on an art showcase where their family and facility staff could come and see what they've been doing all week. It was awesome to see all their accomplishments!

These past few weeks really put into perspective on what Free Arts does, what the youth have been through and how art can change impact their lives. It was hard to hear about some of the experiences many of these youth sadly have had to experience. They have been through some really heavy stuff. But it was amazing to hear about how the art was helping them feel better and more empowered and how they felt liked they never been able to create before. Many of the kids said they have never felt accepted anywhere until they came to camp. A lot of the children who were shy and withdrawn really opened up towards the end.

These past two weeks made me realize the importance this organization is in the community and how it can and will continue to transform lives. I'm excited to continue to intern here at Free Arts and ready to take on the second half of the summer!

Photos from camp are coming soon! I promise!

So this is kind of old...

....but non the less, it still made me excited!

So Free Arts of Arizona was featured on Channel 3 news a week or two ago and I missed the actual news report, but I found the video on AZ Family. It talks about an event called Art and Soul that was the release of "Unleashing Creativity: the power of being creative," a documentary by Phyllis Lane and served as a fundraiser for Free Arts that happened last weekend.

http://www.azfamily.com/video/newsat9-index.html?nvid=368932&she=1

Things Free Arts love: VOLUNTEERS!!

If I had learned ONE thing thing from my classwork is the importance of relationships when it comes to nonprofits. It what makes the organization thrive--from getting volunteers, to donors, to whatever--relationships is what makes it go.

What amazes me with Free Arts is the fact that there are about 450+ volunteers and about 10 staff members, yet they all seem to know the volunteers names. They have developed great relationships with their volunteers, which I fully believe is why the volunteers stick around for years. And most of the volunteers LOVES Free Arts! They love working with the children and they love the relationships formed with other volunteers and staff.

I was talking to Lynn, who heads up volunteer recruitment, and she was telling me about how a large chunk of the volunteers come to Free Arts through word of mouth. Today, I was listening in on volunteer orientation and many of them had similiar stories to how they came in contact with Free Arts: "Oh I know so and so and they always talk about Free Arts and what a wonderful organization it is and I just knew I had to get involved!" 

It's exciting to see the passion that the volunteers have.

The volunteer program is under a lot of changes right now--they are trying to make it more streamlined so they can keep up with older volunteers more and get them reconnected, as well as come up with a way to thank their volunteers at the end and keep them involved. However, with or without these changes--I believe Free Arts is doing a really good job at keeping its volunteers happy.

I'm excited to see what type of growth the changes will bring to the organization in the volunteer department..