Express yourself
Art and commerce empower teens in Artists for Humanity
For almost 25 years, Artists for Humanity (AFH) has led the way in empowering and employing Boston teens (between the ages of 14 and 18) by offering a platform to express themselves via an intensive program of arts, creativity and enterprise.
AFH’s success can be attributed to several factors, one of which is its core program, the Youth Arts Enterprise. The program relies upon a paid apprenticeship model, wherein teens are partnered with professional artists and designers to design, create and sell art products. The Youth Arts Enterprise annually employs 250 Boston teens. During the school year they work nine hours over three days; in the summer, they’re engaged in 25-hour work weeks.
The teens are involved not only in the creative process but meet with clients, participate in the negotiation process, and help with marketing. “We’re firm believers in art and commerce linking, and we know it’s important to be able to market one’s art, to understand that there are markets for design and that kids are really empowered,” says Richard Frank, AFH’s marketing director.
Another reason for the organization’s success is its entrepreneurial spirit. Frank said the lifeblood of the organization is “the commissioned jobs that the artists and their mentors work on.” Currently AFH dispatches more than 600 different client jobs a year. Projects include everything from graphic design and creating videos, to branding t-shirts that are designed and printed in-house at the AFH Epicenter, to sculpture and 3-D work.
With fully equipped and staffed studios, young people and mentors also collaborate on creative projects, many specifically commissioned by clients.
In addition, AFH works with corporations all over Boston on a range of art design services, including installation of exhibits, custom murals, and sculptures for new condominium projects. They’re also collaborating with architects and interior designers in custom-made pieces for large-scale developments. AFH youths recently created a colorful metal disc installation located on the Massachusetts Turnpike, bordering the Frieda Garcia Park. Program participants also created the big scrim that hangs on the side of the Ink Block in the South End. Other projects also have involved making furniture out of reclaimed collateral for Neiman Marcus for both its Chicago and Bay Area stores.
Partnerships are a key component to AFH’s success. In addition to his role as marketing director, Frank actively is involved in developing new business for the nonprofit organization. “My role is to find those good partnerships so we can do creative collaborations and to kind of keep our link to the marketplace and give young people more opportunities for creative endeavor.”
Frank de
scribes his work as two-fold. “I am looking to sell particular products but we’re also trying to find people who might have a need for art services. I think about how that’s going to be done by the young people we employ and train right here in our studios. Each of the students work with a professional artist so we have a nice blend of teaching professionals with the high school students. We’re able to bring all those elements to the fore and find ways that businesses and corporations want to partner with us to have some solutions to design problems they might have.”
AFH has big plans. They’re currently in the midst of an expansion that will triple the physical footprint of their building and allow them, once the structure is built, to have a “net positive” energy building. This means creating more energy than they use. “It might be the first of its kind in Boston in a commercial space. If we’re able to succeed in building that building, which would probably open in 2017, we would most likely over time almost double the amount of teens we employ here.”
The benefits to hiring Artists for Humanity, Frank says, are “fresh ideas, some youthful perspective, the energy and a certain level of excitement that we bring from our studios — both traditional and non-traditional approaches to things. We really love to use sustainable materials in our work as much as we can. We have an environmental consciousness that we bring to a lot of projects. We’re always kind of willing to go that extra mile to make something that is going to be stellar, at least we hope it will, and conversation-worthy. I think corporations appreciate that.”
For more information on Artists for Humanity, visit www.afhboston.org.
This article appears in our May issue of Banner Biz which you can read here.
