Community Programs

Community Programs (4)

Self Portrait

BuildaBridge Community provides arts-integrated intervention and education to children and families in under-served communities. In collaboration with local schools, community centers, transitional homes, and religious congregations in Philadelphia, BuildaBridge Community delivers creative arts educational experiences, and therapeutic intervention through art-making in music, drama, dance, creative writing, and the visual arts as metaphor to teach life, social, character and academic skills.

Our primary goals for our Philadelphia programs are to provide children & youth with:

the critical elements needed for healing from trauma due to violence & abuse in order to break the cycle violence;
experiences that foster healthy development & hope for their future;
experiences that develop academic, social, artistic-expressive skills and that foster character development;
experiences that allow development & rehearsal of skills for living as responsible, contributing and empathetic citizens.

Committed to principles of love, compassion, justice, reconciliation and service to others, BuildaBridge offers unique programs featuring cross-cultural perspectives and arts-integrated approaches that are child-centered, trauma-informed and hope-infused.

BuildaBridge’s main constituency in Philadelphia consists of low-income African-American and Latino children, ages 7-14 who live in homeless shelters and transitional housing. BuildaBridge also works with the out-of shelter “homeless” children living under informal extended family and guardianship arrangements. Almost all of BuildaBridge’s constituency is living below the poverty level. They are at risk of withdrawing from school and/or engaging in risky behaviors. Regarding the living environments for much of our constituency, data on community demographics indicate the total & personal crime, robbery, assault and burglary risk rates are 200 to 600 times the national average for zipcodes 19144, 41, 38, 29 and 19.

BuildaBridge serves approximately 350-400 different youth annually in the city of Philadelphia.