Arts Connect - Art and living Charitable Foundation

Mission

Our mission is to empower students to learn in more comprehensive ways by promoting creative, critical thinking and interconnecting mandated classroom subjects with art and design principles that find common applications in the world around us. We believe programs featuring leading creative personalities and contemporary celebrities whose accomplishments are relevant to young learners will enhance students’ understanding of the importance of education in everyday life. We bring the field trip to the classroom.

Purpose

By harnessing state-of-the-art multimedia capabilities, IConnect fuses exploration of the arts, humanities, and sciences with conventional classroom methods by making connections between outstanding achievements in real-life and their foundations in traditional subjects such as math, science, history, and language mandated by state educational standards.

Vision

IConnect intends to become a national educational program, offered free of charge, to benefit students in public schools, private academies, charter schools, alternative educational environments, after-school programs, homeschool education, juvenile detention centers, and high-risk environments.

The Dilemma

Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, politicians have been trying to lay blame for the perceived failings of an educational system in decline. Now, 35 years later, some international testing still shows students from nearly half of the industrialized countries in the world outperforming students from the United States but, instead of pulling together and fixing the system already in place, special interests, profiteers, and politicians have found reasons to begin pulling the system apart and spawning, for good or bad, a wide new range of experimental schools and programs, both public and private, with mixed results.

The Situation

Teachers have consistently identified prevailing curricula and instructional methods as detracting from their ability to manage and motivate all students. Some of these deficiencies include outdated, irrelevant materials, materials that students have difficulty connecting with, and materials that inadequately address the concepts teachers expect students to master. Also, some of the digital learning platforms that are now required by school districts are too time-consuming, as teachers interact with students, learn more computer programs, prepare for in-class instruction, plan assessments, and perform a wide range of other duties.

As school systems struggle to keep pace with contemporary ideas and technologies, students become increasingly stifled and disinterested in their education.

A core curriculum that remains outdated

Students deserve a modernized curriculum integrating STEM and the arts with structured lessons and everyday activities.

Board of Directors

Jeff Marinelli

Jeff has extensive experience as a software engineer, entrepreneur, and marketer. He has successfully led companies and teams spanning business products, media, and software platforms. Jeff is the CEO and founder of Art and Living magazine, a global publication that features creators around the world. Prior to establishing Art and Living, Jeff headed up his own software consulting practice with a team that serviced Fortune 500 companies in implementing financial and human resource systems. Jeff began his career in technology in the energy sector starting with HL & P and then ENRON as he supported the petrochemical pipeline industry.

The story of the Art and Living Charitable Foundation begins in 2012 at a foster care center in Los Angeles where, while interviewing the director of the center for a magazine article, Jeff took notice that children in one of the center’s programs were using art to express their ideas and thoughts, hopes and dreams, and to heal emotionally. Struck by this experience and its implications, Jeff undertook a study of the broader arena of children’s art programs offered by schools, museums, and other community support agencies and realized that art was quickly vanishing as a core ingredient in the lives of our children. The relevance of art in the lives of the children he had observed seemed obvious and profound and it was then that Jeff committed to finding a way to tap the power of art to make a difference. The result was the evolution of Arts Connect program currently made available through the Art and Living Charitable Foundation.

Candace Crawford

Candace is CEO of Maverick Brands, a consumer products company which targets healthy and organic beverages to consumers. Candace has more than twenty years experience in senior leadership roles in financial management and operations in both public and private companies. Prior to joining Maverick Brands, she served as a C level executive for such brands as Zico Beverages, POM Wonderful, Virgin Entertainment and Metropolitan Theaters. She has built world-class management teams and has been instrumental in working with entrepreneurs to nurture exponential company growth while maintaining necessary financial and operational disciplines. Candace began her career at Price Waterhouse as an auditor where she received her CPA license.

Candace has a passion for the Arts Connect program designed to bring arts back into the classroom. While volunteering at a local public high school, she realized how many children had true creative passion and talent and would be inspired by exposure to the arts, although parents and other life-guides were not supportive of artistic endeavor because of the lack of perceived connectivity of the arts to real-world job opportunities – a consideration of paramount importance to families for whom college attendance was not a financially feasible option. Candace believes that the Arts Connect program offered by the Art and Living Charitable Foundation has potential to overturn these beliefs and thus to forever change the range of actual opportunities for these students.

Tackling real-world problems makes learning more tangible, relevant and meaningful.

Real-world examples provide concrete applications of knowledge and skills learned in the classroom, illustrate their relevance, and encourage students to be aware of the choices they make and how they fit into a greater societal context. Real-world examples demonstrate the complexity and unpredictability of on-the-job challenges and thus stimulate critical thinking. They also highlight the need for an inter- and multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving and encourage students to think about solutions, rather than focusing only on problems.

Students can find themselves in a math class as they design the car or building of the future. They can find themselves in a science class as they formulate a substitute for aspirin. If the week’s lessons focus on the study of triangles, students might discover their importance in the design and manufacture of a skateboard or a hang glider. At the beginning of each school week a video is shown indicating the topic students will be working on while a daily short video focuses on the specific task at hand for the day. IConnect connects the dots between the study of triangles and their practical applications. This is called connected learning.

English Language Arts