PROGRAMS

Digital media arts are the future. As a 17-year State/Local partner to the California Arts Council, Upstate Community Enhancement Foundation-Friends of the Arts, Butte County, is committed to traditional arts and culture while engaging with the future.

We’re about community, nonprofits, artists, recreation, government and what makes every human being special – culture.

Arts Education – Artists in Schools: The Artists in Schools program supports projects that integrate community arts resources—local artists and non-profit arts organizations—into comprehensive, standards-based arts-learning for PreK-12 students during the school day. Applicants’ projects must take place during regular school hours at the school site, and should address the unique circumstances of the school environment.

YouthForce sees underserved and at-risk teens paired with organizations and relevant local issues in need of professional and compelling media campaigns. YouthForce teams are guided through an intensive multi-week program, learning the ins-and-outs of video production technologies and practices, meeting with clients, and developing and producing a professional media product. Their work is important and celebrated, expanding their relationships and appreciation for their community – an experience that can continue to shape the rest of their lives and expand the many opportunities ahead of them.

Artists in Communities supports sustained artistic residencies in community settings, demonstrating that artists are integral to healthy communities and that the arts are a societal cornerstone that brings people together, builds community, and fosters social progress. AC centralizes artists and their artistic processes as vehicles for community vitality. AC Projects are artist-driven, and engage community members as active participants.

Artisme classes combine movement, writing, theater and visual arts to build confidence in the creative arts voice. Learn to express yourself in a productive, healthy and potentially life-changing way to influence others with Artisme methods.

The Veterans in the Arts (VIA) program is rooted in the desire to address the needs and improve the lives of California’s veterans through the arts. VIA seeks to increase equity, access, and opportunities for veterans to participate in quality arts programming that is sensitive and responsive to their unique experiences.

With support from the California Arts Council, Friends of the Arts Big Star Veterans Flag Project has collaborated with Chico Veterans Resource Center and identified a group of veterans to paint silk flags, symbolizing their service experience (both female and male from diverse service branches and eras – Korean, Vietnam, Iraq & Afghanistan) culminating in a public display of the flags.

Local artists Tanya Mead-Mullins and Christine MacShane led a weekend workshop in early winter of 2016.

The Local Impact program provides support for community-driven arts project. This program fosters equity, access and opportunity for historically marginalized communities by cultivating community participation in art making, learning and exposure.

Local Impact supports projects that provide access to arts participation and/or representation of and by the community.

STORY PIRATES worked in Chapmantown- an underserved community in Butte County- for a 3-day residency at Chapman Elementary School. They worked one day in the community- seeking rich cultural material- and then went into Chapman Elementary to tackle substantive educational goals like vocabulary development, story structure, revision and building confidence in self-expression, culminating in a performance of youth-inspired stories at Laxson Auditorium.