MISSION

Our mission is to develop and support innovative partnerships that have a sustainable, positive impact on arts and music participation and learning in the classroom.

While the arts are almost universally loved and appreciated in one form or another, art and music education is losing ground in our schools.  Not only does exposure to the arts from an early age help cultivate bright, creative, and socially engaged students; an arts education has an immense impact on their academic careers. From helping in the development of language and reasoning, problem solving, memorization, and pattern recognition to actually getting better SAT scores, an art education has a clear and measurable impact on the academic lives of our students.  That is why the Blackwing Foundation is dedicated to developing contemporary and innovative programs that can bring the arts and music into the lives of our children.

To this end we work to:

  • Enable unique partnerships to design and implement programs which have a beneficial and lasting impact on students and schools
  • Focus on supporting high quality programs that not only inspire students, but develop their knowledge and skills and connect to important curricular objectives
  • Expand breadth of programs to cover a growing range of arts and music genres as our resources and new partnership opportunities develop over time
  • Help empower local communities to build self-sustaining advocacy efforts and commitment to funding of a widespread arts and music curriculum in their schools.

BW Foundation, Inc. (dba The Blackwing Foundation) is a 501(c)3 Private Foundation organized to support educational institutions and related activities with a primary focus of supporting arts and music education.

THE CASE FOR ARTS & MUSIC EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS

Participation in curricular arts and music programs is central to both the academic and social development of our youth.  Unfortunately, even solid well established curricular arts studies in public schools are often among the first programs cut during challenging budget times and with an increasing focus on test scores.  This is despite strong positive correlation between arts and music engagement and elevated academic performance.

After school and community based programs are a nice supplement, but often lack the sustained impact of a sequential curriculum in arts and music that is standards based and that should be available to all of our youth.

We believe the active student participation in a broad arts and music curriculum from year to year is essential to learning, to living a fulfilling life and to the preservation of culture.  We believe that continuous school based arts and music programs endow vital skills such as creativity, group collaboration; both adaptive and analytical thinking and a commitment to lifelong learning that are key factors in life success.  Finally, we believe that all students at the K-12 level should have the opportunity to engage in vibrant and well-grounded arts programs and thus are committed to focus our efforts on broadening both reach and quality of such programs.