I think we left today’s meeting of the Any Given Child Indy Community Arts Team both energized and exhausted! There has been such amazing progress, but there is also a mountain of work ahead.

After an inspiring welcome from President & CEO of WFYI Public Media Lloyd Wright about the critical importance of arts education, we jumped right into adopting a set of four goals for the work of Any Given Child Indy. These four goals are the framework for an Action Plan that will guide all our work on behalf of students through the end of 2020. The formal goals will be released in detail later, but they focus on:

• uniting schools and arts organizations;
• eliminating district-wide gaps;
• creating robust professional development; and,
• measuring the impacts on students.

The second part of today’s meeting began the planning for Action Strategies for the coming year, and finally, we looked at what governance structure will be needed to make change happen. It was one of our most engaging of meetings, informed by six months of data collection and reflection that will now be leveraged to ensure access to the arts for every child in Indianapolis. Through it all, I was impressed with the depth and breadth of the passion and talent in the room that the Kennedy Center was channeling to improve student success through the arts. Next month, our plan is to adopt a new governance structure that will allow for many more voices to be at the implementation table.

Ernest Disney-Britton, Arts Council of Indianapolis, Director of Grant Services & Arts Education