San Carlos, CA – The Redwood City Arts Commission has awarded a San Carlos arts center $1,500 to help launch its inaugural youth mentorship program this January.
The one-year pilot program will pair six students from Sequoia High School in Redwood City with members of Art Bias—a studio center and artist community based in San Carlos’ Industrial Arts District. Under their mentors’ guidance, participating students will learn to work in various mediums, develop their portfolios, visit local museums, and curate a Dec. 2023 final exhibition showcasing their work at Art Bias’ newly renovated Studio 114.
Art Bias Executive Director Terra Fuller submitted her small grant request to the commission last month, and it received unanimous approval at the commission’s Oct. 6 meeting.
“The minute I put in the proposal for this, they jumped at it,” Fuller said.
In 2020, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that after steadily increasing throughout the 20th century, access to arts education has been declining for the past three decades, with budget cuts leading K-12 schools to prioritize core subjects like mathematics and language arts at the expense of visual and performing arts. But in the wake of Covid-19, educators are looking to the arts as a remedy for students’ deteriorated social and emotional health as well as a tool to improve their lagging test scores in primary subjects. At the same time, several Bay Area cities—including San Jose, San Mateo, and Redwood City—are increasingly investing in public art programs to facilitate community engagement and urban development.
At the Oct. 6 meeting, Commissioner Jason Newblanc said Art Bias’ youth mentorship program meets the commission’s goals of supporting up-and-coming artists and fostering long-term relationships among arts organizations in Redwood City.
“I really feel like this fits with our mission of weaving art into the fabric of our community,” he said.
The $1,500 from the commission will fund the program’s opening and closing ceremonies, adding to the $54,000 in grant funds Fuller has already amassed from the California Arts Council ($19,000 for 2023, and $19,000 for 2024) and Dragonfly Community Arts ($16,000 for 2023)—which will go toward artist compensation, art materials, and snacks for the first two years of the program.
While Art Bias members have hosted informal workshops at the center since its founding in 1993, Fuller said a recent push to diversify its income as well as artists’ long-time interest in student engagement led her to the idea for a youth mentorship program.
“It’s really something we have to offer, you know, the community connections that our artists have,” she said. “[The students] can see there’s actually a whole world of artists out there working that you would never know about. It’s a game changer for them.”
With Sequoia High School only a mile away and equipped with an International Baccalaureate (IB) program, Fuller saw it as the perfect partner organization. She pitched the idea this past spring to Sequoia arts teachers Christle Waters and Mozelle da Costa Pinto, who in turn brought it to the school board.
“We got a yes with a lot of strings attached,” Waters said.
Those strings include the completion of in-depth background checks on the artist mentors, extensive documentation of when and where students will be traveling, and successful navigation through a not yet defined approvals process.
Although the project is still pending district approval, Waters said she is confident they will be able to kick off in January, as planned. Any Sequoia student can apply, and once chosen, selected students will visit Art Bias once a week for two-hour sessions with their assigned mentors. The 40 total weeks of mentorship each student will receive per year includes eight weeks of summer sessions.
“It’s a hard thing for us to do because it’s definitely a side project to all of our teaching,” Waters said. “But I think giving kids space to explore and to make mistakes—I’m not sure if they’re really getting that elsewhere.”
Sequoia is a Title I school, meaning it qualifies for federal funding because of its “high percentage of children from low-income families,” per the U.S. Department of Education. During the 2020-2021 school year, 40% of Sequoia students qualified for free or reduced lunch, meaning on average their families had an annual income below $34,209.
Even though many Sequoia students take art classes through the school’s IB program, they are rarely afforded extracurricular opportunities to nurture their creative curiosity.
“We’d like to give a boost to our underprivileged students, so I think that’s the audience we’re going to target,” Waters said. “Giving students exposure that they likely wouldn’t otherwise have, I think, will be really rewarding for them and for us.”
Fuller said her reward will be watching the mentor-mentee relationships grow over time.
“Most arts programming is a 90-minute class—one and done,” she said. “Since we’re not having to fulfill some sort of core curriculum standards, [the mentors] can really be creative with what they do with the students.”
Still, amid debates about California Proposition 28, which would provide additional funding for arts and music education in K-12 schools, Fuller said programs like this one should not replace but instead supplement classroom instruction in the arts.
“It’s great to have both, not one or the other.”
