About Us
Mission
LitiArts is dedicated to expanding access to literacy and arts education for young people by meeting them where they are: in community spaces, schools, and digital platforms. We work alongside youth, families, schools, and community organizations to create learning experiences that affirm who young people are, what they bring, and the communities that shape them.
Vision
We envision a world where every young person has access to literacy and arts education that values who they are, builds on what they know, and supports them in creating, leading, and shaping their lives, their communities, and the generations that follow.
Why Literacy and the Arts?
Over the last several decades, access to sustained arts education in U.S. K-12 public schools has become increasingly uneven, with the greatest disparities in financially under-resourced schools and communities serving BIPOC youth. At the same time, literacy education has often narrowed toward tested skills, leaving less room for the creative, multilingual, and culturally rich ways young people already read, write, create, and make meaning. At LitiArts, we believe young people should not have to choose between educational success and their identities, languages, cultures, or ways of knowing. LitiArts joins a growing movement to change that by creating literacy and arts experiences across the places young people already learn, create, and connect, from public schools and libraries to community and digital spaces.
Literacy is more than reading and writing. Young people make meaning across multiple modes: through words and language, images and sound, digital media, movement, and touch. They read, write, speak, photograph, draw, perform, and create in their everyday lives.
Literacy and the arts are also already present in our communities, including in forms that are not always recognized or valued as literacy, learning, or artistic practice. They live in the stories people tell, the multiple languages they speak, the music they make, the images they create, the ways they move, and the knowledge shared across families and generations.
This is why we bring literacy and the arts together. The arts give young people multiple ways to express themselves, their identities, cultures, languages, interests, and whatever else they dream.
This is the foundation of every LitiArts program. We start with what young people already know, create, and carry with them.
Our Pillars
Expansive Literacies
We believe literacy is more than reading and writing. It takes multiple forms, including oral, visual, digital, and gestural, and happens far beyond the classroom. Young people create, communicate, and make meaning in ways that go far beyond the page.
Confidence + Creativity
We invite young people to trust their ideas, take creative risks, experiment with new forms of expression, and recognize the value of what they create.
Reciprocity
We believe that learning and growth happen through mutual exchange. Every LitiArts space is built around this principle. Young people, teaching artists, educators, partners, and communities all bring something, and all leave with something meaningful. Reciprocity is at the heart of everything we do.
Community
We co-create spaces where young people build relationships, learn alongside one another, and deepen connections to the communities that shape them.
Leadership
We believe young people are already leaders. We create spaces where they can share their ideas, make decisions, take initiative, and contribute to their communities.
