Creative Kids run an exciting Arts Club throughout the school holidays for children age 6 - 14. Children explore a wide range of combined arts such as drama, dance, puppetry, film, photography, music, storytelling, craft and experiment with different artistic techniques such as oils, watercolours, inks, spray cans, clay and charcoals. We use iPads to help children overcome barriers to learning and emerging technologies such as 3-D printing and Virtual Reality. The day is broken into workshops where visiting artists inspire the children to explore their creativity. All the children on our Arts Program are automatically enrolled onto the Arts Award (a National Qualification in the Arts) We have successfully taken 57 children through an Arts Award since 2012.
The Holiday Arts Club is great fun, kids make new friends and build in confidence as budding artists. Our Arts Education Centre is situated in Boscombe; an area of extreme deprivation. A high percentage of the children that we work with have special educational needs, have already experienced some form of abuse or mental illness in the home, are underachieving at school, have low self esteem and sadly do not share equal life chances to that of their peers.
Outcomes for children include a qualification in the arts, increased confidence and self-esteem, leadership skills, co-operation and teamwork skills, decreased social isolation, overall well-being and pathways to future employment. Outcomes for parents include respite, time to access support services, attend job interviews or start volunteering.
The Sovereign Centre named us ‘Charity of the Year 2014’. We won the Cash for Kids Children’s Charity of the Year in 2015 and have been awarded the very prestigious Queens Award an MBE for Volunteers at Buckingham Palace in June 2016.
We have been fortunate in the past to receive 'disadvantaged subsidy' funding from various sources including the Arts Council, The Big Lottery and grant making trusts to make up the shortfall. Our volunteers are working hard behind the scenes applying to new funders, but this takes time, a commodity that we simply do not have if we are to continue supporting vulnerable families throughout the summer months. It costs just £15 per day to send a child to club, £75 for a week or £450 for the whole summer.