Sixth Street Youth Program Annual Highlights Fall 2016 - Summer 2017
After School Program Fall 2016- Summer 2017
Our after school program for the 2016-2017 school year served 45 students from 7 local elementary and middle schools representing a diverse cross-section of the Lower East Side community. We provided a daily pick up service from 5 of those schools, as well as a nutritious snack and an hour and a half of homework support. 90% of our enrolled families benefitted from our sliding scale financial aid program rates, with 15% of students attending program on full scholarships. We are especially proud of our daily enrichment workshops, which focused on environmental sustainability, visual arts, creative writing, and other creative offerings through local neighborhood partnerships.
Notable highlights were:
Summer at Sixth Street 2017
Summer at Sixth Street is our summer program, which this year ran in two sessions for six weeks during July and August 2017 and served 45 students from the local community and other boroughs. Over 75% of our enrolled families benefitted from our sliding scale financial aid program rates, and we were able to offer scholarships to 15% of our campers. Our programming highlights included:
Belize Project, April 2017
The directors of Sixth Street Youth Program, Jen Chantrtanapichate and Libby Mislan, and Sixth Street board member Amikole Maraesa, traveled to southern district of Toledo, Belize during our April break to run a week long arts and creative writing program with 15 young people ages 9 to 16. The program was held at Mango Meditation Healing Arts Center, Amikole’s newly established community center in Punta Gorda. Through various arts projects, creative writing workshops, and a culminating poetry video project, our students were empowered with tools and support to express and share their unique cultural heritage.
We also coordinated collaborations with a local Mayan Family who taught our students how to make chocolate out of cacao beans using an ancient stone ground method, and a local Garifuna woman who taught our students how to make coconut oil from her homegrown coconuts. During this trip, students also learned how to make herbal medicine with plants that are native to southern Belize, like “fever grass” (known in the U.S. as lemongrass.)
Our Belize project was incredibly successful and as rewarding for our participating students as it was for us. Through April’s pilot project, we established important connections with local Belizeans to create future cultural exchanges between New York City and Belizean youth grounded in the arts, culture and environmental sustainability.
Our after school program for the 2016-2017 school year served 45 students from 7 local elementary and middle schools representing a diverse cross-section of the Lower East Side community. We provided a daily pick up service from 5 of those schools, as well as a nutritious snack and an hour and a half of homework support. 90% of our enrolled families benefitted from our sliding scale financial aid program rates, with 15% of students attending program on full scholarships. We are especially proud of our daily enrichment workshops, which focused on environmental sustainability, visual arts, creative writing, and other creative offerings through local neighborhood partnerships.
Notable highlights were:
- Weekly arts and poetry workshops taught by our experienced teaching artist staff. Our inhouse arts and poetry workshops integrate teachings from Focusing Oriented Expressive Arts Therapy (FOAT) and InterPlay, an improvisational movement and storytelling technique. Our workshops are process-oriented and emphasize building artistic confidence and deepening community through sharing creative work. We use creative mediums as a vehicle to express emotions, process current events, and honor community.
- A partnership with Wide Rainbow, a non-profit that exposes youth to visits with well known contemporary artists and local museum trips.
- Weekly gardening workshops at the Fifth Street Farm rooftop garden facilitated by our experienced staff. Through our gardening curriculum, we engage students to think critically about their role in urban sustainability as well as basic garden maintenance such as planting, weeding and harvesting. Some of the topics/questions we explore are:
- Where does the food we eat daily come from?
- Identifying the life cycle of food from seed to waste
- Compost! How to do it and why it matters.
- Recognizing the importance of supporting local food sources
- Waste, how to reduce, reuse and up-cycle
- Defining a carbon footprint
- Cooking with the food we harvest or the food we source from Sixth Street’s CSA
- Submitting projects to NYC’s Department of Environmental Protection Water Resources Art and Poetry contest. Our students submitted projects in the form of flip books, sculptures, paintings, and theatrical projects documented through video, all exploring the impact of trash in New York City’s waterways. Three of our students won an award for their sculpture in the shape of a fish made from recycled bottles! The winning project aimed to highlight the negative impact of human trash on aquatic life in NYC waterways.
- Weekly Hip-Hop dance classes in collaboration with Everybody Dance Now (www.everybodydancenow.org).
- 12 students participating in a professional play, Daughtyr, that premiered at Triskelion Arts and JACK in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. These students attended a weekly rehearsal using our third floor studio space and were involved in collaboratively building a scene into the play. Students gained valuable theatre experience related to singing, on-stage improvisation, and costume/makeup.
- Partnering with Loisaida Center in preparation for the annual Loisaida Festival Parade honoring Puerto Rican cultural leaders from the Lower East Side. Four weeks of puppet making workshops with artists in residence and participation in the parade.
Summer at Sixth Street 2017
Summer at Sixth Street is our summer program, which this year ran in two sessions for six weeks during July and August 2017 and served 45 students from the local community and other boroughs. Over 75% of our enrolled families benefitted from our sliding scale financial aid program rates, and we were able to offer scholarships to 15% of our campers. Our programming highlights included:
- Activism workshops introducing students to local issues of food equity and affordable housing. We engaged students in these issues through interactive scavenger hunts where students explored access to fresh and local food, and neighborhood change. Students then used their findings to craft interview questions in preparation for in-depth, small group interviews with local community members with strong neighborhood engagement.
- Weekly poetry and expressive arts workshops taught by Sixth Street facilitators culminating in a “zine” project, as well as a guest workshop with Citylore (http://citylore.org). Our workshop with Citylore engaged students in spoken word poetry honoring the legacy of Harlem poet and activist Sekou Sundiata.
- Gardening workshops at Fifth Street Farm twice weekly. Over the summer we are the primary caretakers of the garden, which means frequent opportunities to harvest fruits and veggies. In our weekly Thai cooking classes, Jen introduced us to making Thai style fresh rolls using all harvested veggies from the roof top garden. We hosted a workshop with our beekeeper Ray Sage to introduce students to the bees that live in our two beehives on Sixth Street’s rooftop. In the process we tasted delicious honey and learned about the important role that bees play in our ecosystem.
- Four storytelling workshops with renowned global storyteller Laura Simms (http://www.laurasimms.com.) Quoted by the New York Times as “a major force in the revival of storytelling in America,” Laura visited our program several times throughout the summer to share folktales from around the world and engage our students in their own improvisational storytelling.
- Field trips to Governor’s Island for bike riding, Central Park Row House for canoeing, The Whitney Museum and Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm. The Whitney was a new trip for us this year and we enjoyed the interactive exhibit of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, as well as the collection of 20th century American protest art.
- Daily swimming at the local Dry Dock Pool (a favorite local spot for our students!)
Belize Project, April 2017
The directors of Sixth Street Youth Program, Jen Chantrtanapichate and Libby Mislan, and Sixth Street board member Amikole Maraesa, traveled to southern district of Toledo, Belize during our April break to run a week long arts and creative writing program with 15 young people ages 9 to 16. The program was held at Mango Meditation Healing Arts Center, Amikole’s newly established community center in Punta Gorda. Through various arts projects, creative writing workshops, and a culminating poetry video project, our students were empowered with tools and support to express and share their unique cultural heritage.
We also coordinated collaborations with a local Mayan Family who taught our students how to make chocolate out of cacao beans using an ancient stone ground method, and a local Garifuna woman who taught our students how to make coconut oil from her homegrown coconuts. During this trip, students also learned how to make herbal medicine with plants that are native to southern Belize, like “fever grass” (known in the U.S. as lemongrass.)
Our Belize project was incredibly successful and as rewarding for our participating students as it was for us. Through April’s pilot project, we established important connections with local Belizeans to create future cultural exchanges between New York City and Belizean youth grounded in the arts, culture and environmental sustainability.
