Become an Arts in Corrections coordinating organization
State funding available for organizations looking to bring rehabilitative arts workshops to California prisons
The California Arts Council is looking to expand and diversify the state’s Arts in Corrections program, and we want you to become its newest coordinating organization.
We believe that arts education is an essential tool for healthy human development and lifelong learning that must be made available to all. Providing people access to the arts has an immediate, direct, and positive impact on their personal health and welfare, as well as their surroundings.
Administered by the California Arts Council in partnership with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Arts in Corrections is an internationally recognized program known for its high-impact, innovative approach to addressing our state’s critical public safety needs and rehabilitative priorities through the arts. Arts engagement helps people in incarceration build and strengthen positive personal and social relationships, increase critical thinking, cultivate healthy behaviors, and bridge cultural differences. The benefits of the Arts in Corrections program are far-reaching — within and outside the walls of our state’s correctional facilities.
We recently released a new Request for Proposals (RFP) aimed at increasing the number and variety of arts workshop offerings within the program. Does your organization have experience providing instruction in visual, performing, literary, cultural, folk & traditional arts? Do you want to help create positive spaces of safety and well-being inside our state’s correctional facilities?
In a conscious effort to simplify the submission process and increase access, cultural competency, equity, and inclusion among interested organizations, the new RFP includes plain-language templated forms, instructions, a video tutorial, and a webinar to help walk your organization through the elements of your proposal. These new tools help make it easier for small, grassroots or volunteer-based organizations, or any organization unfamiliar with the state RFP process to provide arts programming by becoming a potential Arts in Corrections coordinating organization.
If your organization wants to make a difference through making and teaching art, we want to help make that happen. Like California as a whole, our program — and its participants — only stands to gain from greater diversity within its coordinating organizations.
The final deadline for submitting proposals is April 8 at noon PDT.
For more information about the program, visit the California Arts in Corrections website.
