Our Summer Art Program is under way! This week we are working on clay and watercolor painting. For the next two weeks, our kids will work on creative projects using pastels, tempera paints, collage, paper mache, ink drawing, beading, and finally music and theater. We serve families from all over Hughes County and surrounding Counties, not just kids from Holdenville schools. But we need help from our community to continue! 

As you may know, our program has been funded since the 1990s with a grant provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Oklahoma Arts Council. This grant, which originates from the federal government, is coming to an end this year. We want to keep this tradition going for years to come, but the Holdenville Society of Painters and Sculptors is a small organization and our yearly member dues are not enough to continue the program in its current form. So we are asking for support from you starting this year. 

Every year we teach 50-60 children in our summer program over 3 weeks in June. We try to give them experience in many artistic mediums using high quality supplies. On the other hand, we keep our tuition low. Each class is only $20.00 for the morning or the afternoon class, so a parent can send their child to our program for only 20 or 40 dollars a week. That's only 10-20% what other equivalent summer art camps cost in our state! That is important because we want every child in our community to have the opportunity to experience art, not just the children whose parents have a lot of extra funds. It is vital to provide this to our children because many of our kids come from schools in Hughes or Seminole County that no longer have art or music programs in school. But that means that we have to rely on outside funds like our old grant to be able to cover the costs of hosting the program for our kids. 

The #1 expense of our program is paying our wonderful teachers! We hire schoolteachers to teach because the students are young kids (going into first grade and up) and we have large classes with a lot of kids (as many as we can fit in the building)! ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of donations in this campaign will go straight to paying our SUMMER PROGRAM TEACHERS. The tuition we receive from the families is enough to pay for all the art supplies and the utilities in our building during the program. Even if you can give just 5 or 10 dollars, please show your support for our long-running program so we can see if we have enough support to try to continue the program in the future.