Inner-City Arts

Inner-City Arts was founded in 1989 to help local communities provide arts education and instruction that was no longer available in public schools. The organization began in the heart of Skid Row in downtown L.A., working with some of the city's most vulnerable children. Over the years, Inner-City Arts has served more than 200,000 students and 10,000 teachers in the L.A. area and has improved student achievement by increasing their confidence and creativity. The organization partners with the Los Angeles Unified School District to offer more than 5,000 elementary school students an arts education on the Inner-City Arts campus every year. Inner-City Arts provides students with in-class arts instruction, after-school extracurricular workshops, summer workshops, and college and career guidance. The organization also trains educators to effectively teach the arts and guides administrators as they incorporate arts instruction into other areas of their school's curriculum. Evaluations of Inner-City Arts have shown that its programs have drastically improved creativity, English proficiency, and even standardized mathematics scores for the students that they serve.