FOUNDER'S MESSAGE

Two years ago I was trying to find a way out of public affairs. I was discouraged by what I saw in our welfare systems and I longed to return to the ceramics studio where I spent long days and nights in my 20s working on chess sets, marionettes and chimerical creatures. But I didn't want to turn my back entirely on social service work and decided I would open the ceramics studio to at-risk teenage girls.

But that never happened.

Instead, after locating the studio in Hollywood and meeting with nonprofit organizations serving the local youth, I found myself facing a group of young people who looked remarkably like me when I was 19.

I proposed to them that they could take ceramic classes in the studio I was building. They looked at me blankly, not one was interested. But then they asked me if I could teach them about music...make-up...fashion...acting--things in which they were interested.

When I was 19 I was living in Paris. Every day I would take the metro to Parsons Art School in the 15th Arrondisement. I wasn't a student there but no one questioned my attendance. I hung around the studios and asked the studio technician for help. As everything around me deteriorated, I felt safe at Parsons. I felt empowered. It took four or five more years for me to finally believe in myself enough to focus on my life but my time at Parsons planted the seed. When I was 23 I taught myself how to become a ceramist after I spontaneously bought a pug of clay at the art store to help me release the tensions of a destructive relationship. Looking back, I don't know how else I would have survived.

For 7 years I bartended in Hollywood. I also managed my ceramics studio. When I was 27 I went to art college in Oakland, California. When I was 28, an encounter with poverty caused me to revaluate my own fortune and I transferred to UCLA for my BA, which I received at 31.

I remembered my own story as I listened to their stories and I saw an opportunity to help an amazingly strong and smart group of young people. Young people who were struggling with the tension between their need for help and their desire to be autonomous, their optimism that they could reach their dreams with the depression that greeted them each morning not knowing how to move forward.

* * * * *

We at Hollywood Arts believe that the creative experience, for both makers and participants, is inseparable from healthy emotional and intellectual development. 

Experiences with the arts provide young people with a place to feel safe; develop thinking skills; experience accomplishments that lead to improved self-esteem; teach relationship management through group exercises; and help young people master basic educational concepts. The ability to manage these aspects of one's life helps individuals to become healthy, successful people who are empowered to change their own lives, helping to break the cycle of poverty.

While it is crucial to provide homeless young people with basic needs such as shelter and food, helping them become productive adults will be best achieved through education. Through arts education, young people learn to become better thinkers, and that increases their confidence and improves their self-esteem. They also learn basic art-based and technological skills that build their resumes. 

Immersion in the arts provides them with the tools, both personal and professional, they need to move out of poverty and into successful lives.

Join us at Hollywood Arts. Your investment represents a substantial long-term savings in public funds when the much more costly social service responses to chronic homelessness, dependency on welfare, or incarceration are considered.

And your support will change a life forever. I know it will.

Dylan Kendall
Founder, Executive Director, Ceramist