By Creative Opportunities team at WolfBrown and GIVE Colleagues
This third issue of Amplifying Creative Opportunities focuses on young adulthood—the pivotal years bridging late high school and early adult life. It’s a time when young people make crucial choices that will define how, and even if, arts and culture will remain part of their journey.
Our work involves observing and interviewing hundreds of young people, many of whom want the energy, meaning, and sense of contributing that can come from creative work. But for generations, specialized arts learning, sought-after internships, and pathways into positions in the world of arts and culture have been inequitably distributed. This suite of articles describes how it’s possible to intervene and change the ecosystem around those pathways so that the young people who seek to work in and contribute to the creative economy can find the opportunities they seek.
In This Issue
On-The-Ground
Supporting Multiple Creative Pathways: Insights from the Bloomberg Arts Internship (BAI) Program
by Creative Opportunities team at WolfBrown
Many young people want the energy, meaning, and sense of contributing that can come from doing creative work. But the pathways into working in the creative economy can be challenging to identify and follow, too often resulting in unequal opportunities. In this piece, the WolfBrown team, along with their colleagues in the Bloomberg Arts Internship, explore how it’s possible to change that ecosystem by introducing young people early to a wide array of work possibilities that combine creativity with rewarding and reliable employment.
Breaking Barriers 1
The Power of Youth Storytelling in Appalachian Kentucky: Revisiting Lessons from Partners for Rural Impact
Arts learning is often seen as mastering technical skills, but it also nurtures self-advocacy, communication, and collaboration. Kathleen Hill shares an example of how the arts provide a stage for young people to shape and share their ideas with the public.
Breaking Barriers 2
Teach with GIVE: Accessible Arts Learning In and Beyond Classrooms
by Dennie Palmer Wolf in conversation with GIVE Colleagues
The GIVE initiative equips educators with tools for equitable, creative classrooms where all students thrive. In this post, we share how this collaboration is reshaping teaching and impacting cultural organizations.
Re-Tooling the Trade
Ghetto Film School Re-invents Admissions
Here, Dennie Palmer Wolf shares insights from the Ghetto Film School team, highlighting how their commitment to high-quality, equitable film education transforms gatekeeping into gateways.
Keeping Curious:
For Your Library and Toolbox
This collection of resources is designed to stir conversations. Films, research, novels, and websites all speak, in different ways, to the same point. That is, the work of amplifying creative opportunities is everywhere. It exists in the daily habits of how we interview, the ways in which we audition and cast, and what we choose to research. Have at it!