Setting the Stage: Practical Ideas for Implementing High-Quality Afterschool Arts Programs

Youth benefit from involvement in the arts. At the same time, youth from families with low incomes are about half as likely to have access to arts instruction as youth from families with more resources, due to cuts in arts education which disproportionally affect schools in under-resourced communities that have been economically and socially marginalized. Arts programming outside of schools is also inequitably distributed, and when the arts are offered in low-cost settings such as multipurpose afterschool programs, the programming tends to focus on arts and crafts rather than the creation of original artwork that develops formative artistic skills. The Youth Arts Initiative (YAI) aimed to address the gap in access to high-quality arts by developing a sustainable and scalable model of arts programming in multipurpose out-of-school time (OST) organizations. From 2019 through 2021, five Boys & Girls Club organizations, with startup resources from The Wallace Foundation, set out to test whether they could develop YAI within the resource constraints of multipurpose OST programs. This report shares early lessons learned by these five OST organizations which were documented by a two-and-a-half-year study. It provides a preliminary roadmap for multipurpose OST organizations seeking to increase the quality of their arts programming and close gaps in access to high-quality arts programming. The findings shared in this report can also be used by organizational leaders to make the case to funders and policymakers that initial investments in a high-quality arts program infrastructure are needed and that those investments will expand access and equity in arts programming for youth.