Project Soar

Our plan

Nyla Arslanian and her team at the Hollywood Arts Council, a nonprofit formed to ensure that the arts play a role in the revitalization of Hollywood, remember what it was like when they were young. Even if they didn't have special art classes, there were always opportunities to visit museums or do ceramics outside of class. But that's not the case in a lot of Hollywood's elementary schools — many of which are filled with a surprising number of students from low-income families. So Arslanian set out to provide these students with the same arts exposure she'd once had. After working with the Hollywood Boys and Girls Club and the LA Alliance for a Drug-Free Community for a few years, Arslanian decided to start her own program, and the first seeds of what would become Project SOAR were planted.

 
 Deciding to create a program was the easy part. Making it happen was hard. By 2000, Arslanian and her team were frustrated. They'd been working all the normal channels, trying to find enough funding to get going. Nothing was working. Without money, without connections to the higher-ups in the LAUSD system, Arslanian figured there was no chance she'd ever be able to help her local schools. Then, out of the blue, Arslanian got a call from a local school principal. The school was desperate, the principal said, for some sort of arts programming. They remembered Arslanian’s work with the Alliance. Could she help? Quickly Arslanian realized that it wasn't impossible to work directly with schools, to bypass the bureaucracy. All she needed to do was to stop spending all her time trying to land funding and instead spend it working on individual relationships. And so Project SOAR was born: providing a local title one [Title I] Hollywood elementary school with four-session arts workshops, offering students the chance to work with local artists on paintings, murals and other projects that gave them a sense of real accomplishment through project-based learning.



What we did

In the last few years, Project SOAR has expanded to offer their services to eight Title I Hollywood elementary schools: Alexandria, Cheremoya, Grant, Los Feliz, Micheltorena Street, Santa Monica Community Charter, Vine Street and Selma. Funded in part by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and the Hollywood Arts Council, Project SOAR recruits professional artists from the community to teach workshops in a wide variety of arts disciplines, such as Shakespeare, Ceramics, Mixed Media, Music, Drawing and Photography. A diverse mix of 25 third through sixth grade children is then chosen by each school to work with the artists for the duration of a workshop -- four two-hour sessions (one session per week for four weeks) that provide a total of eight hours of classroom instruction in each art discipline.