Silvermine Arts Center Receives $10,000 Grant

Silvermine Arts Center has received a $10,000 grant from the Fairfield County Community Foundation to fund an evaluator to measure academic benefits from Silvermine’s Art Partners program, which provides curriculum-based studio arts programs to students in Norwalk and Stamford.

Since 1992, the Art Partners program, currently directed by Sophia Gevas, has been collaborating with classroom teachers and program directors to provide programs that teach history, geography, science or literacy through hands-on art projects. The programs are tied directly to the curriculum. Over the years, Silvermine has provided classes for over 12,500 under-resourced K-12 students in Norwalk and Stamford schools. Currently the program brings art experiences to students in five elementary schools, two middle schools, and three social-service programs.

Silvermine Arts Center has been a proud member of Norwalk ACTS (Achieve/Collaboration/Teams/Success), a diverse partnership of more than 100 civic leaders and organizations taking collective action to ensure our students’ success. Several groups within Norwalk ACTS have been focused on finding ways to measure the critical nature of social/emotional learning and determine its role in academic success.

For years anecdotal evidence has supported the effectiveness and the social/emotional benefits of the Art Partners programs. Now that the Norwalk School system has developed a base metric for these skills, the center is poised to be better able to measure the effectiveness of our programs and substantiate the premise that the arts promote student development and academic success.

“With this grant, Fairfield County Community Foundation has offered us an opportunity to hire a professional evaluator to more fully align our program outcomes with the Norwalk ACTS goals,” said Leslee Asch, Executive Director of the Silvermine Arts Center.

Photo credit: Silvermine Arts Center.