Giving Compass' Take:

• The Nord Family Foundation discusses strategies of its grantee, the Resilient Richland Initiative in South Carolina, which utilizes arts programming to build resilience for young people who faced adverse childhood experiences. 

• How can education philanthropists help promote art programs that are mandatory in schools to increase access to arts education?

• Read more about how to engage students in arts programs.

The Nord Family Foundation has been exploring the role we can play regarding emerging evidence about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES), a significant risk factor for a variety of health and social problems across the lifespan and a major factor in much of the work we fund.

One of our recent grantees in this area is the Resilient Richland Initiative (RRI) in Columbia, South Carolina, one of several NFF-funded projects that are working to address trauma-informed care. Once ACEs have been diagnosed, the goal is to create resilience in the individual in which it has been diagnosed, with a focus on the assets — as opposed to risks and deficits — that he or she possesses, including such things as coping skills and family and community supports.

Our own strategy to address resilience has deferred to organizations in the health and social services arenas. Upon further consideration, however, we've begun to see our local arts community as an important and perhaps overlooked asset. Many of the arts programs we support play an invaluable, if underappreciated, role in addressing this piece of the poverty puzzle.

Trauma produces isolation, a feeling of "I am in this alone." Arts programming — be it music, theater, or visual arts — helps erase that sense of aloneness and provides a platform for building the kind of resilience all of us, but especially young people who have struggled with ACEs, need.

For vulnerable youngsters in need of connection, a community theater company can serve as a second family. Through our grantmaking, we have found that access to adequately funded music programs such as Education Through Music provide hope and spiritual buoyancy to children and their families, many of which quietly struggle from crisis to crisis.

Read the full article about arts programming as a resilience strategy by Mitch Nauffts at PhilanTopic