Hey, kid! How do I get (and keep) your attention?
Much can be said about the lack of access to enrichment opportunities for youth growing up in urban, high-poverty neighborhoods. But what about all those after-school programs that few kids bother to attend, or that never get off the ground to begin with?
Lesson No. 1: Don’t call an arts program an arts program. For tweens, the word arts triggers associations with museums (boring) and arts and crafts projects (for little kids, the identity they’re trying to shed).
Anyone who knows a tween––of any economic bracket––knows how hard it is to keep his or her attention during those vulnerable, pivotal years between ages 10 and 13 when, suddenly, parents aren’t the only ones deciding what to do outside school anymore. Tweens can choose to spend their time in a myriad of ways, whether hanging out, texting, playing video games, shooting hoops or (psst, don’t tell anyone) doing homework. They care about nothing more than fitting in.
Our friends at the Wallace Foundation, seeking to engage low-income young people in the arts as a way of narrowing life opportunity gaps, commissioned a strategic marketing group to find out: What makes a program desirable to kids?
Evidently, they aren’t the only ones interested in the answers. More than 500 people from California to Minnesota to New York tuned in to a webinar Thursday on the resulting study, “Something to Say: Success Principles for Afterschool Arts Programs from Urban Youth and Other Experts.”
On the call were the report’s two authors, Denise Montgomery and Peter Rogovin, who normally