Mission
Our program, run in Madison schools and community centers, connects youth affected by incarceration to opportunities in our larger cultural arts and academic communities. We partner with BIPOC artists and educators committed to equity and inclusion through creating cultural capital. We know that incarceration disproportionately affects low income communities of color. We also know that low income communities of color have less access to cultural arts opportunities. Michele Obama led the Obama Administration's Committee on Arts and Humanities in a study to find the effects of cultural arts engagement on low-income youth. It concluded that arts participation creates positive social outcomes especially among "hard-to-reach and economically disadvantaged students, and that low-income, arts-engaged kids are more likely to attend college. Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary, author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, studied 200 underrepresented black male youth from the same community, 100 incarcerated