Young Audiences, Arts for Learning: National Networking for Arts Educators
Young Audiences: Arts for Learning (YA) was founded over sixty years ago by Baltimore educators who believed that exposure to music through live performance should be an important part of educating children. Today YA brings music, theatre, dance and visual, literary and digital arts into TItle One schools (schools with large concentrations of low-income students) across the United States.
YA brings hundreds of exceptional teaching artists to partner with classroom teachers to provide in-depth arts residencies. Dancer Lin Tang, a YA teaching artist in New York City since 2013, says “Arts speak a magical universal language.” She finds working with children a mutual learning experience, which inspires her to explore a diverse community and re-connect to her cultural heritage. Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Tang came to the U.S. in 2002, and has performed professionally at numerous venues and festivals including President Obama's Inauguration in 2013. She currently teaches Chinese dance at K-12 schools, universities and community centers.
YA came to us for help gathering the myriad parts of this vast organization in one place and presenting it to the public. Our challenge was to create a collaborative, multi-part platform which we developed using Drupal and CiviCRM. It included:
A public-facing Website easily updated by YA’s national organization itself
A map to find information about the various affiliates throughout the country
An intranet for Affiliate organizations and their educators like YA New York to share contact information and curriculum case studies
An extranet for Affiliate organizations to share curriculum case studies with the public
WhyArts, a blog for distributing the network’s news and events
An e-newsletter pulling content from WhyArts
Tools for sharing content to social media networks
A Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) solution to manage the constituent database, events, donations and e-newsletter subscriptions
Today YA is a network of 450 educators and has grown its constituent database to over 10,000 individuals and organizations. It is the nation’s largest arts-in-education learning network, serving over 5 million children and teens each year in more than 7,000 schools and community centers across the country through a diverse network of 30 local affiliates. Users are able to autonomously add new curricula and other content, and seamlessly manage the blog, newsletter, and events registration facilitated by Drupal and CiviCRM forms and approval workflows.