New Urban Arts Wins Prestigious National Award!

On November 4, at a White House ceremony, First Lady Michelle Obama presented the Coming Up Taller award to New Urban Arts. A project of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), the Coming Up Taller award is the nation's highest honor for the field of out-of-school time arts and humanities programs. Only 15 programs from across the nation are named winners annually. New Urban Arts is a nationally recognized interdisciplinary arts studio for high school students and emerging artists in Providence, Rhode Island whose mission is to build a vital community that empowers young people to develop a creative practice they can sustain throughout their lives. They provide studio, exhibition space, and mentoring for young artists who explore the visual, performing, and literary arts through yearlong free out-of-school programs. Founded in 1997, New Urban Arts serves 150 high school students in Providence’s public high schools and 20 artists each year. In addition to this recent honor, they have been named one of fifty premiere arts and youth development programs in the country for five years. Congratulations to New Urban Arts!

RIASPA and PASA host December 8 event at Save the Bay highlighting afterschool professional development system components

On December 8, over 35 afterschool professionals and advocates assembled at Save the Bay to enjoy a joint presentation by RIASPA and PASA entitled Rhode Island's Professional Development and Capacity-Building System for the Afterschool and Summer Learning Field.

During the presentation, Sarah Cahill, Executive Director of RIASPA, provided a framework regarding Rhode Island’s progress in building the multiple components of a professional development system for the field. Participants heard about how our state is a leader nationally in professionalizing the field through its creation of core competencies, quality standards and connected assessment system, and a quality rating and improvement system (BrightStars). However, there still are components that require creation in order to be a true professional development system.

To illustrate this point, Sarah offered an overview of a report commissioned by RIASPA and PASA entitled Building a Professional Development System for Rhode Island Afterschool and Summer Learning Programs. The report’s intent was to highlight the current components of a professional development system and where gaps exist; offer a glimpse into higher education opportunities for afterschool and summer practitioners; and discuss the importance of scholarships and financial support for practitioners in relation to professional development and certificate-based or degree-bearing programs.

RIASPA’s Manager of Quality Initiatives, Joseph Morra, further delved into the report, mentioning how a program landscape and professional development survey administered to the field this past March supported the findings of the report. As such, a fair amount of data from this survey was infused into the report, offering insight into the field’s professional development desires, workforce composition, and responses about what resources would improve the field as a whole.  

Elizabeth Devaney, PASA’s Deputy Director, then presented data from years one and two of the Rhode Island Program Quality Assessment (RIPQA) tool, demonstrating how Rhode Island stacked up against the nation in four key areas of quality: safe environment, supportive environment, interactions, and engagement. Overall, our state scored slightly higher than the national reference sample in all four areas. The RIPQA tool is both comprehensive but user-friendly, and the substantial support provided by quality advisors undoubtedly helped the programs using the tool to achieve scores demonstrating high-quality practice in action.

Offering a national context for field quality and capacity building was special guest Nicole Yohalem, Director of Special Projects for The Forum for Youth Investment. During her presentation, Nicole offered research about increased awareness of the afterschool and summer workforce as well as emerging evidence that professional development does improve youth outcomes and staff performance. She additionally commended Rhode Island for its current systems building and strong national showing with our RIPQA data. She also encouraged us to “insulate” the education pipeline; in other words, be intentional in connecting to the early childhood field on one end, but also to post-secondary on the other end in order to create as seamless a system as possible for children and youth to be successful in work and life.