Background: The Roots of Greenhouse Arts Center
Greenhouse Arts Center is a new, life-giving arts organization for families currently based in Harlem. Our mission is to build community locally and globally by connecting cultures through holistic visual and performing arts education. We are dedicated to providing for the needs of families and raising future leaders centered around the motto: "Dream. Create. Thrive."
The origins of Greenhouse Arts Center were rooted in our founder, Lauren Panzica’s work developing and leading the K-4 dance program at Global Community Charter School (GCCS) in Harlem. This program supports and reinforces students’ academic curriculum during school hours. Educators and families soon discovered that their students demonstrated an enhanced connection to learning in Lauren’s visual and performing arts classes. They immediately approached Lauren about the shortage of affordable, accessible and quality extracurricular arts education options in their community.
Lauren realized that this need intersected with her own life-long dream to develop a multi-disciplinary arts education center that supports local community and inspires global impact. In her mission to meet the families’ desire for such a program, Lauren approached local teaching artists about making this dream a reality.
Greenhouse Arts Center officially kicked off programming in October 2015 by offering three children’s dance classes: ballet, musical theater, and hip hop. Since then classes have been held every Saturday at Harlem’s Bethel Holy Church, where we are fortunate to use donated space. Each class is offered at an affordable rate of $10 with a one-time $20 registration fee per student to support operational costs.
Each class runs for one hour and is led by an experienced teaching artist and assistant. The classes include a warm up, technical instruction, choreography and performance for our students' families. To diversify and supplement our weekly programming, we also offer special workshops that explore other visual and performing arts disciplines. One that we most recently offered is a workshop that taught our students, who we refer to as our "dreamers," techniques on how to express themselves through rap and spoken word poetry.
Our staff also takes time during classes to encourage and help our dreamers to create reasonable goals mirrored with accomplishing their long-term dreams.
As part of our focus on giving back to their community, we engage families with a monthly service project. So far, we have organized a donation drive for the Bowery Mission, created Valentine’s Day cards for patients at the NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, and are currently coordinating an event for our dreamers to collaborate with local senior citizens.
Challenges: Finding Good Soil and Nourishment
Currently, we have approximately 70 registered dreamers with numbers growing each week and will soon outgrow the donated space where we hold classes. Our families are continuously hungering for more programming that would require us to gather additional resources and expand our operations with a facility to accommodate camps, mid-week and full-weekend programming.
In order to qualify for opportunities to further the growth of our community arts center and provide tax exemption for our donors, we feel it is necessary to become a nonprofit with 501(c)(3) designation. In the interim, we are seeking a solution to help us secure functional class, performance, and administrative space; compensate our teaching artists and administrative staff competitively; expand our programming; cover operational needs; and grow our community outreach programs.
Prior to discovering Fractured Atlas’s Fiscal Sponsorship opportunity, we worked to implement our own solutions to meet Greenhouse Arts Center’s immediate needs. For example, we recently implemented a monthly subscription plan to provide discounted tuition options to families. Additionally, we are preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign to close the gap between Greenhouse Arts Center’s current and future financial needs.
