Four Youth participant Jairus Branch used a drone to shoot this photo and software to manipulate it. Courtesy of Four Youth
WILMINGTON — Four Youth is committed to its long-term mission.
“There’s this metric in which [organizations offering grants] ask you how many kids you serve,” said co-founder Theresa Emmett. “But for us, it’s more about quality over quantity” and about serving students over an extended period.
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“For instance, I’ve been at Thomas Edison Charter School for our programming for close to 12 or 13 years, for years before we even started. It’s the same 120 kids every single year for nine years. And I think that’s how you have the greatest impact.”
Four Youth was founded in 2013 by Emmett, then an after-school photography teacher at the Wilmington school; science teacher Janae Dupree; and Raphael Dahan, Emmett’s husband and a digital artist. The nonprofit now serves more than 450 students each year at schools, community centers, and its headquarters in Brandywine Village, just across the Brandywine from downtown Wilmington.
“Four Youth has been life, my everything,” Emmett said.
Dupree has moved away, and Dahan serves as board president, committing his time to the oversight that boards traditionally offer, his expertise to the young artists, and his muscles for three weeks of debarking, sanding, and preparing logs donated by the Davey Tree Expert Co. to become stools and benches for the Urban Sense Project at Thomas Edison.
Four Youth programs focus on the visual arts, environmental science, and engineering. This is a class at Thomas Edison Charter School in using found objects to make a mural. Courtesy of Four Youth
“We built an entire wildlife sensory garden for our students there,” Emmett said. “Then the kids had a professional artist conduct workshops that connected our student to nature’s food.”
The founders felt that participants needed encouragement to reach higher. Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded them a $89,190 grant as part of its efforts to increase arts participation among underserved groups.
“Our classes are geared towards showing career opportunities to our students that they otherwise may have not considered,” Dahan wrote on his LinkedIn bio.
“It is through art that we strive to inspire our children in making the right choices,” he wrote. “We stimulate their creativity, build their confidence, and expose their individual potential through the classes we teach.”
The nonprofit focuses on four pillars – education, mentorship, employment, and scholarship – with “an artistic intent in everything we do,” Emmett said.
Emmett and Dahan’s artistic background also helped them connect to their landlords: Colourworks Photographic Services co-owners Eric Russell and Gerard Piotrowski.
A field trip to shoot wildlife at Middle Creek. Courtesy of Four Youth.
How kids learn
Programming focuses on the visual arts, environmental science, and engineering, preferably tying the disciplines together naturally. “For instance, today our kids were learning about mutualism between algae and fish, and then they learned about good algae, bad algae, what is algae,” Emmett said. “And then we followed that by actually making paintings.”
Mutualism, for those who have forgotten earlier biology lessons, is a symbiotic relationship between organisms of two different species in which both benefit.
One way that Four Youth infuses the arts into several pillars is by educating participants about photography. Outsiders can employ Four Youth for event photography, where Emmett mentors them. “I go in as a [salaried] professional and then usually hire two to three high schoolers to come with me, and then Raphael does all the post-production on the images as a volunteer,” she explained.
Impact of the grant
The NEA grant is part of ArtsHERE, a pilot program to increase arts participation among underserved groups.
A field trip to shoot wildlife at Conowingo Dam. Joe Del Tufo photo courtesy of Four Youth.
Other supporters include the Longwood Foundation, the Chichester duPont Foundation, Justice Outside, the Laffey-McHugh Foundation, the Welfare Foundation and the Delaware Division of the Arts.
Emmett called the grant “a game-changer” for the organization, whose annual budget is under $400,000. “We are definitely at a point of [financial] sustainability. We are over the moon to be able to have this opportunity to bring the arts to more students.”
Four Youth has a staff of two full-timers (including Emmett as executive director), one part-timer, and a half-dozen instructors, mostly UD seniors and graduate students studying the fields that they teach. Programming takes place in school, after school, and on weekends.
She’s looking for more instructors and hopes to use the NEA grant to hire a visiting artist and add three more schools for specialized programming like the Urban Sense Project. Lewis Elementary, a Wilmington school teaching in English and Spanish, has just signed up.
“Four Youth can be an important factor in your life that will change you into a greater person,” Jairus Branch wrote in a testimonial posted on the nonprofit’s website.
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