About the Nonprofit
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Venice Arts' mission is to ignite, expand, and transform the lives of Los Angeles’ low-income youth through photography and film education, and use our participatory storytelling practices to amplify the voices of underrepresented communities around the world. With classes ranging from beginning to advanced and a college and career pathways program readying youth for careers and college education in the Visual Arts, Venice Arts creates life-changing opportunities for Los Angeles’ low-income youth by providing young and emerging artists opportunities to share their creativity and engage with a broader community.
Venice Arts’ largest, longest-running program, Art Mentoring & Education, provides a sequenced, Media Arts Education curriculum, college success programs, and creative career development—completely free of charge to low-income young people from throughout Los Angeles. Our Center for Creative Workforce Equity targets young people ages 16-24, offering a sequenced program—from exposure, education, and training through internship placement—that helps build a more equitable and inclusive creative sector. Priority is given to uplifting those whose lives have been most challenged, including homeless, foster, justice involved, and LGBTQ youth.
Through all of our programs we reach over 800 young people, each year. As community demand far exceeds our current facility capacities, we turn away approximately 150 low-income youth annually. 95% of youth served are low-income; 53% live in poverty. Just under 50% live in Venice, Mar Vista, Culver City, and neighborhoods with high pockets of poverty on the West Side; the balance live throughout Los Angeles County including Mid-City, South L.A., and Inglewood, and some travel from as far as Norwalk and the Antelope Valley to participate. Most (85%) are youth of color, the majority children of immigrants, and nearly all attend poorly performing public schools and have no access to meaningful creative education.
Youth in our programs receive life-changing opportunities, such as competing for prestigious national and local awards, with over 100 won since 2014, including a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts and 100% of our teen participants graduate high school, and 95% go on to college, often the first in their families and most receiving significant scholarships.
