St. Petersburg-based musician and educator Alex Harris started the Arts Conservatory for Teens more than a decade ago to offer “world-class” training and performance opportunities in music, theater, dance, film, art, leadership and entrepreneurship.
With an eye on career development and improving the lives of teens through arts education, ACT is not a typical after-school program. It targets underserved school systems and at-risk communities, using the arts as a catalyst to prepare students for high school graduation, higher education and then local jobs. ACT is designed to enhance students’ problem-solving skills, self-esteem, and critical thinking skills through intensive creative study.
The nonprofit’s alumni have gone on to places like Berklee College of Music in Boston and Otterbein University in Ohio, Harris said. Many have established careers in television, film, the music entertainment industry and Broadway. A talented singer-songwriter, Harris was the fifth of eight siblings, many of which have careers in media, professional services and the arts.
After piloting ACT for a few years, in 2014, you started an art, culture and careers festival in partnership with the student government and the College of Arts and Science at the University of South Florida. The program went from 30 to 150 students. What happened next? Then Walmart, for the first time, was funding initiatives like ours, and we got $40,000 from them to grow. That was the biggest check we ever got. Before that, we had seed funding of $25,000. Today, we work in eight locations. We paused with Covid because, of course, we couldn’t go into many of the facilities, so we went 100% online, and we had significant student engagement online. We started with 1,000. We ended up with about half of that, like everywhere else, about 500. We were back in person last January.
What does that look like? We have three focus areas in our curriculum. One is character essentials, where 90% of the program focuses on character development using 40 character principles. We do that before school. Then we have the programming of our curriculum after school, which is in the arts magnet school, where 90% of that focus is on skills development at the beginner and intermediate levels.
We also have our Young Creators Alliance, which includes young folks across the Bay area and Sarasota. They can come to us and be a part of this alliance. Some of them meet every week. Some of them meet quarterly. Some of them meet only when we do master classes or summer intensives. We put this together for them to learn the pathway to making a career in the creative workforce, be it literary arts, acting, dancing, video production, technology, gaming, music, photography or multimedia.
This is all about the workforce. Yes, every aspect of the creative workforce. Our students take classes or workshops in those areas. We do master classes that give exposure to the legal and managerial sides. We bring in major recording artists as we did with singer and songwriter Gregory Porter. The students get a chance, early in the day before the night’s show, to meet the artists and or their support crew and learn about how they got into the industry. What is it they do?
It looks like you have impacted many life trajectories. Today, it’s 13,000 we’ve touched.
Do you feel a sense of elation to move the needle? Yes. It’s because I’m from a small town and I’m one of eight children. It was music that became the glue for the family, the magnet for discovery in our own personal life pursuits.
What is the first music you remember? Singing in my dad’s church and playing the buckets from my neighbor’s backyard. My drumsticks were pine tree branches, and my brother took rubber bands from the collards and strung two of them together to make a four-string guitar. He’s now an attorney in Tampa with his own practice.
Is your dad a pastor? He is. He has a small congregation. And he’s a retired educator and is still pastoring a little church. My mother is also an educator.
Looking back a decade in, what stands out? What we’ve done for the past 10 years is define and refine our brand. Our model has intentions to be one of the go-to organizations when you think about how to create a sustainable pipeline that responds to the needs of our community and is scalable and sustainable. That’s our RSS — respond, scale and sustain.
You are both an educator and a musician. What are you first? I am a musician first. This is what inspires me. Our slogan is, “What inspires you?” What inspires me? I still travel, and I still do music. I have a whole team that works for me on that side. I share the same agency as some of your A-listers, like the Gregory Porters, like H.E.R.
I’ve worked with folks who have launched careers. Those people work with me now. And that inspires me to continue to find a way that gives back — not just for the sake of having a foundation or some nonprofit, but for the sake of humanity.
This model is not confined to our area. It is headquartered here. My big vision, and what I feel compelled to preach to the world, is that this can happen in your community. It can happen anywhere. And here’s how we’ve done it. Here’s how you can do it. And our intention is to have chapters and keep scaling.
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Nov 12, 2022 by The Beat Maker - 0 Comments