Current Grantees « Variety the Children's Charity of New York

Current Grantees

Association to Benefit Children

Mission: For children who start life poor, abused, neglected, and worse, it may seem like that destiny is set. ABC refuses to accept that. Since 1986, ABC’s focus has been on some of NYC’s most at-risk children. ABC gives young children the best possible start and the tools they need to succeed.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to ABC supports the replication of its Merricat’s Castle school arts curriculum across ABC’s early childhood programs. Merricat’s art curriculum, which is rooted in the visual arts, music and movement, is designed to involve the entire sensitometer system as well as cognitive and emotional faculties. ABC’s goal is to enhance participating children’s skills, knowledge, and appreciation for all the forms of art though a curriculum that will be integrated into classrooms, with weekly workshops taught by professional artists.

Booker T. Washington Learning Center

Mission: To break the cycle of inadequate education, poverty and despair that pervades East Harlem, while working to maintain a viable and hopeful community.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant funds the Kidz Create program at Booker T. Washington Learning Center. This is a dynamic program that encourages young people to reach out to their community, peers and families by creating art via drama, music, dance or visual expression, that will help address modern day social issues that affect adolescents and teens. Booker T. works with young people more in-depth to learn about things that matter the most: order, integrity, thinking skills, a sense of wonder, truth, dignity, contribution, creativity and cooperation.

Change for Kids

Mission: Change for Kids provides underprivileged students with hands-on activities and personalized instruction in our four core programming areas of Literacy, Arts, Healthy Living and Classroom Support. CFK’s service delivery model, one school at a time, facilitates true partnerships between CFK, school administrators, students, parents, and the surrounding community by rallying support that directly responds to the most urgent needs of these institutions.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Change for Kids funds The Bronx Museum of Art Partnership. This is a museum art curriculum designed specifically for the students at P.S. 73. Once per week, children attend 90-minute sessions in the Bronx Museum’s educational wing. In each session, students are presented with a theme. The theme is discussed and then explored through an example in the gallery, after which they are given the opportunity to create their own pieces of art or poetry, based on what they have learned. Participants are introduced to museum culture and learn how to use the museum as a community resource.

Community-Word Project

Mission: Community Word Project’s mission is to inspire NYC youth in underserved communities to read, interpret, and respond to their world, and to become active citizens through collaborative arts residencies and teacher training programs.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Community Word Project supports their Visual Arts Residencies; funding will be used for supplies and to place professional Teaching Artists in the classroom. In these residencies, a team of 2 Teaching Artists, a visual artist and a writer, visit each classroom once per week, to teach 1-hour class periods alongside the classroom teacher. TAs lead students in visual arts, writing, reading discussion, and performance, and show students how to use the creative arts as a way of understanding and responding to the world.

Groundswell Community Mural Project

Mission: Groundswell brings together artists, youth, and community organizations to use art as a tool for social change. Our projects beautify neighborhoods, engage youth in societal and personal transformation, and give expression to ideas and perspectives that are underrepresented.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Groundswell supports their afterschool and summer public art-making programs. Each project will be led by a team of professional artists with public art backgrounds and youth-development training. Projects will address social justice issues relevant to the community. Participants will learn to use art techniques communicate ideas; how to work effectively with others to accomplish goals; how to make informed decisions through research analysis and discussion; and how to have empathy for others.

Kids Creative 404, Inc.

Mission: The mission of Kids Creative is to use the arts as a tool for instilling today’s youth with personal qualities and skills vital to becoming the next generation’s leaders through exploring the creative instincts as individuals and as part of a group.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Kids Creative will support the expansion of their arts programming into the Bronx. At PS 536, Kids Creative will provide in-school and after-school arts activities as a complement to what students learn during the school day. Classes will include Rock N Roll Theater, Create A Groove, Create an Art Exhibit, etc. During each semester students will develop artistic pieces that will be performed for friends and families. We aim to teach students confidence, creativity, conflict resolution, community, and collaboration.

Opening Act, Inc.

Mission: To be able to offer an exceptional theater program to any New York City school that needs one.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Opening Act funds one free, year-long, after-school theater program at The Franklin K. Lane Campus in Brooklyn. With the support of Variety the Children’s Charity, OA will be able to provide 30 weekly, 2-hour after-school sessions, an OA teaching artist, an OA teaching artist assistant, program oversight by OA’s Executive and Program Directors and two ensemble performances for the students of The Franklin K. Lane Campus, in addition to our annual Year-End Performances.

THE POINT Community Development Corporation

Mission: THE POINT is dedicated to youth development and the cultural economic revitalization of the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. We work with our neighbors to celebrate the life and art of our community.

Program Focus: Variety funding will help make possible the arts-in-education component of THE POINT’s Arts and Advocacy Youth Development Program. Specifically, funding will help Cirque de Monde, a program using circus arts to empower youth through the basic concepts of social circus including trust, self-confidence, focus, perseverance and teamwork; International Center of Photography, a collaborative program in which students learn the fundamentals of black-and-white and digital photography; Visual Arts Program, used to support the positive development of youth and promote arts literacy through weekly workshops.

Arts For Learning, CT

Mission: It is the mission of Young Audiences/VSA to make the arts an integral part of the lives of children in school and community settings, to enhance their development as creative and productive human beings.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Young Audiences of CT funds their community building residencies STAR—Songs, Theatre and the Arts Residencies for our Communities—a program addressing the negative perspective youth have about their communities and connecting them to their communities in a personal way, finding positive aspects and valuable assets within their reach through the language of creative arts. STAR addresses risk factors including limited youth services, negative community environment and limited positive adult role models.

Classic Stage Company

Mission: With THE YOUNG COMPANY, CSC brings the power of classical theatre to thousands of underserved public school children in NYC each year that might otherwise have no access to the arts.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Classic Stage Company supports THE YOUNG COMPANY. THE YOUNG COMPANY makes Shakespeare alive and accessible to underserved NYC public school children through a series of interactive classroom workshops and special student matinee performances—all of which enable teens to understand Shakespeare’s language, identify with his themes, and explore their own creative impulses. THE YOUNG COMPANY speaks to a generation of people of all ages and backgrounds, helping teens to develop a more positive self-image while incorporating important cultural values that are prevalent in Shakespeare’s works.

Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital Foundation at Westchester Medical Center

Mission: MFCH’s mission is to set the standard for family-centered, compassionate care environment which will attract outstanding physicians and staff, impart healing, wellness, and knowledge to all children and families and to be advocate for children’s health in the extended community.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital funds their Music Therapy program in the Child Life and Creative Arts Therapy Department. A music therapist works to assess each child’s individual goals. Depending on their needs, these goals may include music improvisation, receptive music listening, song writing, lyric analysis, guided relaxation to music, etc. This program provides emotional support to patients, creates healthy distractions for patients, and help patients normalize and socialize while hospitalized.

Lollipop Theater Network, Inc.

Mission: Lollipop Theater Network is dedicated to bringing the magic of movies currently in theaters to children confined to hospitals nationwide due to chronic or life-threatening illnesses.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to Lollopop Theater Network funds the Rhythm of Hope program in New York City hospitals. The Rhythm of Hope program brings performances into the hospital with a guest musical artist. The children are then given small instruments to play in the interactive educational segment of the program when they are invited to be a part of the “band”. Our guest artist teaches the building blocks of music and the children are inspired to create their own song, including lyrics. The song is then performed by the guest artist and the “band”. This program creates a fun escape from the daily reality of the illnesses and medical treatments these children face.

National Foundation for Facial Reconstruction

Mission: The National Foundation for Facial Reconstruction’s mission is to ensure that children with craniofacial disfigurements receive state-of-the-art, personalized, and coordinated team care at the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery regardless of the severity of the condition, length of the treatment, or the financial means of the family.

Program Focus: Variety’s grant to NFFR funds its pilot Narrative Video Therapy Project. Dr. Aileen Blitz, the Newman Center’s psychologist, is developing this program which lets patients write, edit, direct, and tape themselves performing and speaking about an array of topics and feelings related to their medical conditions. Children will create their own narrative videos sharing their stories of how facial difference has affected them, using a variety of creative media, such as speech, improve, music, photography and visual and digital art.