Central Florida Community Arts
Programming Funded: School of Arts and Health Teaching Artist Development
Year Funded: 2022
How PSF helped achieve the programming goal:
While the benefits of arts and wellness programs are substantial and well-documented, few training opportunities exist for teaching artists to learn research-backed methods for the populations they serve. In 2022, the CFCArts’ School of the Arts took a critical step in a multi-year teaching artist development project, specifically designed to address this need. With the support of the Winter Park Health Foundation, we created a teaching artist survey, disseminated it locally, regionally, and nationally through the use of our Arts & Wellness Collective and associated partners. Support from the Pabst Steinmetz Foundation allowed us to host a teaching artist convening at the regional level, growing our capacity and bandwidth.
The Teaching Artist convening hosted at the Center for Health & Wellbeing served 12 of the 80 teaching artists that took the national survey. The day-long retreat featured a recap of the survey responses, arts & health activities, a workshop by a music therapist, and several targeted small-group discussions. The three main challenges discovered in the survey and discussed were:
- Affordable & accessible teacher training resources
- Equitable scheduling and pay for teaching artists
- Collaborative marketing approach for services
Through both the survey and the discussions at the convening, CFCArts has taken great strides in supporting our Teaching Artist community by taking time to begin addressing these challenges. It is through the incredible support of the Pabst Steinmetz Foundation that we were able to attain the data which gave us this knowledge and has truly impacted how we have moved forward with supporting our Teaching Artist community.
