Alabama Humanities Foundation awards Grant to the SCAC
The Shelby County Arts Council is proud to announce a grant award from The Alabama Humanities Foundation for their award winning program “Writing Our Stories”. The $7,500. 00 award will be applied to the 2017 budget for the program in Shelby County Alabama.
Writing Our Stories is a program that earned the Governor’s Innovation Award in 2012 and the Alabama Arts Alliance IMPACT Award in 2013 (specifically for the program at Columbiana Middle School) The IMPACT Award is given to one nonprofit arts organization each year for providing exceptionally arts education programming.
This program engages an award winning published poet, Tony Crunk ,to teach 7thgraders how to write poetry. The 10 week sessions end with these 7th graders as published poets. The centerpiece of the program is a bound anthology that features the young writer’s poems. The 10 week sessions are capped off by a fitting commencement ceremony where all the “new authors’ are honored and given a copy of the new anthology.
The Alabama Writers’ Forum designed and developed this curriculum based program to be delivered to “at risk” students in the 7th grade.. AWF has successfully offered this program for 15 years in the Alabama Detention Youth Services (DYS) facilities and, in partnership with the Shelby County Arts Council and Shelby County School system, 6 years at Columbiana Middle School and for two years at Montevallo Middle School.
Executive Director of the Shelby County Arts Council Bruce Andrews says he is proud that the Alabama Humanities Foundation has partnered with us on this program. He adds” We feel this program is a flagship for us. I feel the program is diversified and sustainable considering all the great partners involved; along with the Alabama Humanities Foundation, Alabama Power’s ‘ Power of Good” , Southwest Water, State Rep. Matt Fridy. State Banking Superintendent Mike Hill and many individual members of the Arts Council. We are proud of this program and we have plans to not only sustain it…but expand it in the coming years.”
See the video link below for an insight into the program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lktlqiS-rY
Goals/Objectives of the program
1. Improvement in student writing, reading, comprehension and critical thinking
2 .Behavior modification to learn a safe and productive means of expression
- Learn principles of EMPATHY and RESPECT
