Young Audiences New Jersey & Eastern Pennsylvania (YA) is excited to announce our Artist Innovation Fund. This fund was created for YA’s teaching artists to develop new, innovative content that will engage students, teachers, families and fellow teaching artists during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. With funding from our generous donors and foundations, we are offering grants ranging from $500- $2,000. This opportunity is open exclusively to artists on Young Audiences New Jersey & Eastern Pennsylvania’s roster.

YA recognizes this crisis as a time to collectively innovate in the field of arts education. We are looking for projects that serve two purposes—to provide engaging digital programming and to reinforce the value of a live, in-person arts experience to our clients and partners. This RFP is for the development of supplemental work to enhance and deepen the content of your current YA programs for use by educators, students, and parents now and in the future. We also foresee the possibility of using these digital offerings to promote your existing YA programs to our school and community partners.

Additionally, we are offering teaching artists the opportunity to share their expertise with other teaching artists by developing content for Artist-to-Artist Professional Learning sessions.

Timeline

Proposal Deadline: April 19, 2020 at 5 PM (EST)
Proposal Selection Date: April 24, 2020

YA is eager to fund and support the program development of each successful artist applicant as soon as possible. We recognize these extraordinary times have dramatically impacted the financial stability of our artists. We remain steadfast in our commitment to providing opportunities for teaching artists to inspire young people and expand their learning through the arts.

Whether you decide to develop content for students to deepen and extend learning or content for fellow teaching artists to expand their skills, we are here to guide you through the process. Each successful applicant will have the support of a YA staff member throughout the content development process.

Priorities

Looking at the needs assessment surveys from all stakeholders, three priority areas arose:
Artist-to-Artist Professional Learning (A2APL), Work that Enhances, Supplements and/or Connects to the programs our teaching artist currently offer (Program Supplements), and Creative Beginnings Early Childhood Program Supplements.

A2APL could be a professional learning session (or series of sessions) where a teaching artist who has expertise in a specific area develops and shares with other teaching artists. This could be done using pre-recorded videos, a blog format, or via YA’s Zoom platform.

Program Supplements can be videos or series of videos or engaging downloadable documents that expand on content covered in the teaching artist’s live program.  Concepts, vocabulary, geography, and artistic ideas explored in the live program are spotlighted and further explored. This would be created by the teaching artist and shared by YA with school partners through platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Classroom.

Creative Beginnings Early Childhood Program Supplements include experiences to enhance and deepen current Creative Beginnings offerings. They are also an opportunity for artists to consider how a current YA program can support PreK teachers to address the creative development of children, ages 2-6.

You can find the full application details in the sidebar. Please fill out and submit the form provided on this page in the “RFP Form” tab.