Community-based art and entrepreneurship programs for inner cities: Designing a quality art program model (Illinois)

This case study examines the design of a high quality community-based art and entrepreneurship program, Little Black Pearl Workshop located in one of Chicago's oldest inner city communities. I look at the essential ingredients that are concerned with nontraditional professionally oriented, community-based art programs with an entrepreneurial component as part of their design. From looking at this program, I developed a model that discusses the dynamics that make this program and the model it adopts as essential in helping youth develop more than excellence in craft for art making. This study also takes into account the economic need this type of program helps those from disenfranchised communities meet. Incorporated in this model too, is a unique multiage feature that fosters a learning dynamic that more closely resembles day-to-day encounters in the larger social environment of the youths' cultural community.; Through a more than two year service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in which I worked as a designer to local artisans there, I saw how the economically oppressed possessed skill and a strong desire to meet their needs for survival. In doing so, they employed the arts as a means of helping meet those needs.; In support of effective non-traditional forms of learning that incorporate the arts and entrepreneurship, similar to what I experienced overseas, the overall aim of the study is to identify and describe the critical factors in designing a quality community-based art and entrepreneurship program for inner city youth. Identifying such factors would assist grassroots organizations, community centers, and administrators of art organizations to identify and examine specific components of quality programming that could lead to future exemplary programming and practices that produce excellence.