Arts and Healing Initiative | Arts and Education Council of St. Louis

Arts and Healing Initiative

The Arts and Education Council is excited to launch the third year of the Arts and Healing Initiative, in partnership with Missouri Foundation for Health. The five-year grant aims to improve the quality of life for people throughout St. Louis City, St. Louis County and other Missouri counties. The overarching goal of the Arts and Healing Initiative is to increase the capacity to heal through the arts.

The initiative will provide grants up to $10,000 to 501(c)(3) organizations who have a primary mission that is directly concerned with arts, arts education, healing and well-being.

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The Angel Band Project

Through Telehealth Music Therapy for Survivors board-certified music therapists with experience in trauma will conduct music therapy programs with survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence.

Bread and Roses Missouri

Workers’ Theater Project strives to make theater more accessible to workers and their families, broaden who partakes in artistic expression, and welcome working-class St. Louisans into artistic spaces by using theater to examine and discuss the political and economic landscape of the region, getting to the roots of the poverty and inequity in St. Louis.

Family Resources and Community Connections

Families will learn how to release stress, anxiety and depression, build self-esteem and awareness and how to express, communicate and connect through music, drama and writing.

Intercultural Music Initiative

Sonic Safari is an educational and community outreach program for young people of middle and high school age which leverages diverse cultural programming as a rallying platform for intercultural appreciation and to forge dialogue.

Jacob’s Ladder Ministries

Sew Hope provides therapeutic sewing support groups with access to sewing machines, instruction, and techniques led by local skilled seamstresses for women who have been exposed to the criminal justice system.

A Red Circle

Chosen Pathways is a summer job program for youth between the ages of 15 and 24, that exposes youth to the positive culture of our community, helps them explore their own gifts and talents and network with other organizations.

Rustic Roots

Participants will create natural art through the foods they grow as they learn agricultural arts. The programs will include art workshops at the farmers market, an annual arts festival and culinary art demonstrations.

Springfield Street Choir

The choir provides its singers an artistic outlet, a sense of purpose and a place to belong and works to create social change through awareness and advocacy, is made up of people experiencing homelessness and extreme poverty.

St. Louis ArtWorks

Art Therapy will be provided to youth at St. Louis ArtWorks. Their art therapist will meet with each participant at the start of every program to identify and address barriers and to engage with participants throughout the program to address issues identified by apprentices.

St. Louis Classical Guitar and Hope Creates

St. Louis Classical Guitar in partnership with Hope Creates and Clayton Juvenile Detention Center, will offer a 15-week program for teenagers recently released from incarceration that will provide teens who have a history of addiction with multidisciplinary arts and music healing experiences.

Prison Performing Arts

The Healing Power of Telling Your Story allows individuals completing their sentences at the Transition Center of St. Louis, a community reentry facility in North City operated by the Missouri Department of Corrections, opportunities for self-paced, hands-on learning in their pursuit of self-awareness and healing.

Your Words STL

Crossing Delmar is a collaborative project where students from elementary and middle schools located on opposite sides of the Delmar Divide will collaborate on a creative project which fosters individual and relational healing by guiding the development of racial and emotional literacy.