By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
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on April 01, 2016 at 8:02 AM, updated April 01, 2016 at 9:14 AM

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Cleveland Foundation has launched a sweeping new arts education initiative for children of low-income families with a $500,000 grant to Cleveland Public Theatre to fund a three-fold increase of participants in its year-round Brick City program.

Brick City, which engages 300 children from ages 5 to 14 at the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority’s Lakeview Terrace and Woodhill Homes, will be expanded to 700 more participants over the next two years at four additional CMHA sites that have yet to be determined.

Scaling up

The grant will also enable Cleveland Public Theatre’s Student Theatre Enrichment Program (STEP), which works every summer with at-risk teens to write plays and perform them on tour throughout the city, to become a year-round program.

The theater programs are just the beginning, however. By the end of 2017, the foundation wants to expand its arts education project with additional grants to reach thousands of children in low-income neighborhoods who are interested in visual arts, photography, music and dance in coming years.

“We need to infuse the arts into every neighborhood,” said Ronn Richard, president and CEO of the foundation. “Every neighborhood should have theater or painting and sculpture or ceramics or dance or orchestral music or some other kind of art form. I want Cleveland to be the place in the world that says arts is one of the main avenues for children to become educated and stay in school and end the violence.”

PLAYGROUND from StoryLens Pictures on Vimeo.

Speaking of low-income children the foundation wants to reach, Richard said they should have the same access to high quality arts education as children at Greater Cleveland’s elite private schools.

“These kids should have same opportunities that kids at Hawken and University School and Hathaway Brown have,” he said.

Lillian Kuri, the foundation’s program director for arts and urban design, said the program would scale up rapidly over the next two years as the charity seeks partners in the city’s rich cultural community to conduct programs.

Addressing an injustice

“We’re not looking for small interventions,” she said. “It’s a really big initiative.”

Kuri said that while children in low-income parts of the city may have access to sports programs, access to the arts is often extremely difficult. She called the disparity an injustice.

Richard said: “I don’t think people understand the level of deprivation we have in our city.”

The foundation’s program is conceived as a way to instill values of creativity, self-esteem and teamwork. And it comes at a time when public schools have been scaling back investments in arts education.

The initiative has two core principles. One is to bring arts education programming directly to areas where low-income children live, rather than requiring them to travel after school.

The other is to aim for “mastery,” which the foundation defines as learning a discipline, following through and experiencing the kind of creativity and teamwork the arts can foster.

A long-term commitment

Richard said the foundation would seek additional support for the program in the years ahead from other foundations and corporations, but said his board sees the arts initiative as a long-term commitment.

“The wonderful thing about our board is they don’t have this foundation-project-du-jour approach,” he said.

Richard and Kuri said the foundation was impressed enough by the 17-year-old Brick City project to launch the arts initiative by expanding the Cleveland Public Theatre program.

In Brick City, students attend theater lessons at Lakeview and Woodhill with a pair of educators each two afternoons a week during regular sessions, and four afternoons a week during rehearsal periods. Adult residents from the housing estates also attend with the children.

Programming is divided into four cycles throughout the year, culminating in community performances that include participating in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual Parade the Circle in June.

“They have stories, they have dreams we can’t begin to imagine,” Raymond Bobgan, Cleveland Public Theatre’s executive artistic director said of Brick City’s students.

Learning from the children

“As an artist, when I started doing arts education, I thought, ‘This is what I was going to do to make money to support my art.’ What I didn’t understand was that my art would be incredibly affected by this.”

Jeffrey Patterson, the housing authority’s CEO, said of the Brick City children, “You’re putting them in front of an audience to hone their craft, but a big part of this is to see not just their educational development, but their social development.”

Patterson said: “It’s highly significant that the Cleveland Foundation is taking the step to invest in CMHA and Cleveland Public Theatre. To invest in our home, to invest in where the kids are living — I think that says a lot about the foundation. I hope that others will follow this model.”

In conjunction with the Brick City announcement, the foundation StoryLens Pictures is releasing a documentary film (embedded above) that records the making and performance of “Playground,” a fictional drama based on the story ofTamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot and killed by police while playing with a realistic-looking toy gun.

Holding back tears

One of the performers is Dezhanay Simmons, a 19-year-old Lakeview resident and alumna of Brick City who now works as a teaching assistant in the program.

In an interview at Lakeview Thursday after a Brick City workshop, she said her ambition is to continue working with children in the program, because “I want to help kids come out of their shells, so they can be who they want to be.”

As she thought back to her performance in “Playground,” she recalled learning discipline and focus.

“Every time I did it, I was always trying to hold back my tears,” she said.