Tuesday night, YouthCity Artways didn’t pass the Salt Lake City council to make it through another year. After a 4-3 vote, the program was eliminated, and instead a $150,000 in new grant money will be available for other nonprofit groups around Salt Lake City. This will eliminate about $100,000 from the budget.
“We're not going to serve the population we're talking about by starting over from scratch," Councilman Soren Simonsen said.
YouthCity Artways has been enriching the Salt Lake City community for 13 years, offering low-cost educational and artistic opportunities for people of all ages, and now it is in danger of being eliminated. With a focus on visual, musical and performing arts, YouthCity Artways provides the ability for youths, as well as adults, to explore new avenues of artistic expression, and it allows a parent to have a more active role in their child’s development.
YouthCity Artways offers classes at local libraries, community centers, schools, and in many after school programs. Other aspects of this program enable families who can’t afford to go to the theater, to see a professional play or musical performance. During the 2009-2010 school year they also offered free family art-making workshops and professional development for teachers in schools around the city through a program they administer called the Imagination Celebration of Salt Lake City. It has been shown in several studies that art has a positive academic impact on a student’s achievement.
YouthCity Artways is grateful to all of its supporters, but the majority of the funding that kept them afloat came from support of the City.
The final budget for the 2010-2011 year will be approved on June 22. For information on the YouthCity Artways program, click here.
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Source: The Deseret News
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