By Susanti Sarkar
Aiana Dadanova always loved expressing herself through drawing and painting, but when she entered the foster care system at 17, she found herself living in a Manhattan group home where the art supplies were usually locked up. The only staff member with the key was often too busy “dealing with another crisis” to encourage any creativity.
“It was very hard to freely access the art supplies or just turn on a musical on a TV and sing to it, because there were a lot of other kids there going through so many emergencies,” Dadanova recalled.
She rediscovered that passion when a New York City-based nonprofit, Culture For One, collaborated with her group home to arrange a day of painting and crafts activities for the girls.
They’d set up a variety of tables covered with art supplies in the auditorium area of the building, and staff from the nonprofit shared short tutorials on how to make sculptures, watercolor paintings and collages.
After that first workshop, the invites flowed in. Through its cultural excursion program, the nonprofit organized trips for the girls to Broadway musicals, art museums and photography studios to give them a creative outlet away from the listlessness Dadanova had started to feel living in residential care. “I felt like my life was kind of on hold until I could move out and grow up to have an apartment and get a job, but they didn’t want to keep me in that belief,” she said of the program staff. “They told me, whatever your passions and likes are, you can do them now.”
Like Culture For One, other organizations across the country provide drama, music and other arts education classes to youth in foster care as a way to offer them a sense of stability while dealing with frequent moves and the traumatic experience of being separated from their families.
Among children who have experienced foster care for two years or longer, 59% experienced three or more moves, according to research conducted in 2020.
“When you’re a foster child, you’re not really thinking, ‘I wonder if I could be a ballerina on stage and be good at it,’” said Kymberli Smith, a 21-year-old foster care alum from Queens. “You’re thinking, ‘I hope that this is a safe home that I’m in tonight.’”
Children in foster care often grow up with a need to prove to strangers that they’re “a worthwhile investment,” said Smith, who entered foster care at 15 and is now studying acting at New York University.
When she started working with her mentors at Culture For One, that perception slowly changed. She started attending acting classes, meeting professionals in the city’s theater scene and applying to programs that would have been out of reach without financial assistance from the nonprofit.
Dadanova, now 24, is also pursuing her dream of acting on stage. She currently works at an auction house that sells fine art, but it’s a job she couldn’t imagine having before the support and encouragement she received from her mentors at Culture For One, she said. She remembers feeling too intimidated to check out the city’s iconic museums and galleries as a young teenager.
“Everyone was so successful and educated in the art galleries, and I didn’t just want to walk in; I felt like I didn’t belong.” Dadanova said.
It’s a familiar sentiment for children who grow up in foster care, said Robin Abbott, program director at Culture For One. “These are things that parents and young people take for granted,” Abbott said. “Children in care often don’t because they don’t have this kind of access.”
But creating more equal opportunities for children in foster care to watch Broadway musicals and ballet performances that can cost hundreds of dollars per ticket and meet professional artists helps develop a sense of “self-esteem and belonging in the world, where the world belongs to them as well,” Abbott said.
Fostering Identity
The nonprofit works with foster and adopted families who come to them either directly or through child welfare agencies.
It serves up to 1,700 kids a year through creative art workshops, cultural excursions and art scholarships at renowned institutions in the city such as the Harlem School of the Arts and LaGuardia High School.
And one of their workshops has been particularly effective in encouraging camaraderie and conflict resolution skills between children in foster care, Abbott said.
Trained members of the off-Broadway theater company Naked Angels visit group homes and help young participants write and cast their own scenes in a play which acts as a creative, interactive outlet for their feelings.
“It is always good to deal with those kinds of things in a creative way,” Abbott said. “It allows the children to learn how to get along and how to connect.”
The nonprofit’s excursions are also chosen to reflect the diversity of children in New York City — an overwhelming majority of whom are Black and brown. It’s critical that kids in foster care are given opportunities to attend musicals with a discrete cast, or performing arts schools with teachers who look like them, Abbott added.
Dadanova recalled that out of all the Broadway shows she’d seen with Culture For One — “Hadestown,” “Wicked,” a rare rendition of Othello with Denzel Washington — she connected most with the coming-of-age musical “Hell’s Kitchen.” This is because she could relate to its story of a Black teenage girl navigating a tense relationship with her mother while searching for her identity. “We try and serve as many kids as possible to give them that feeling of belonging, to see themselves reflected back,” Abbott said.
Focus on Creativity Across the Country
In Los Angeles, the Fostering Dreams Project offers art therapy for children and youth aged 10 to 25 in foster care, experiencing homelessness or who have been impacted by the justice system.
Founded in 2014, the nonprofit has partnered with school districts, community-based organizations such as the The Teen Project and Freehab, as well as the Department of Children and Families in Los Angeles County to hold music and dance classes including hip hop, salsa, drumming, and percussion and sound therapy.
The combination, according to the organization’s website, goes beyond learning new choreography or instruments — it’s designed to help kids learn to regulate their emotions, “calm the nervous system,” and improve their focus in other aspects of their lives. According to an impact report on its website, across the 330 schools that participated in the nonprofit’s programs, 78% of students reported increased attendance.
Drumming classes are especially effective in helping children in foster care learn conflict resolution skills, said Dawn Truax, director of outreach at Stageworks Theatre in Florida.
“It relieves depression and anxiety among youth, and it reduces misbehavior,” said Truax. “It is a tremendous outlet for strong emotions. If you want to get a group to blend together, make them drum together, because there’s just something about having to all be hitting, working together on the same rhythm, that kind of pulls people together.”
Stageworks’ education outreach program is supported by grants and donations, and members work with local nonprofits and foster care agencies to provide performing arts education to low-income students, youth in juvenile detention and children in foster care, among other underserved youth populations.
The current classes they offer include “storybook drama,” where children can transform their favorite books into plays, improvisation drama classes to help them develop communication skills, and “heart beat bucket drumming” — a unique art form to help children learn self control and manage aggression in a creative way, Truax said.
“What kids get out of art, what anybody does, is that it helps you process and make sense of the world around you, and maybe even give you a little sense of control over it,” Truax explained. “And with kids in foster care, they really need that. They’re in this Kafkaesque system where they have so little control over their own lives.”
She pointed to the success of a recent Stageworks drumming program that catered to older foster youth who were in the process of earning their GED diploma. Teachers would report that young people in the group often hopped between part-time jobs.
“They didn’t know how to express their frustration without blowing up or just quitting,” Truax recalled.
Introducing the teenagers to the concept of a drum circle has helped them learn critical anger management skills, Truax said, adding that many children and youth in foster care, particularly those who experienced residential care, struggle to identify their mental health issues or overcome the combative environments they’ve experienced in group homes.
“There’s a lot kids learn in these programs that aren’t explicitly taught,” Truax said. “They need ways of expressing what is going on. And maybe they can’t articulate it in words, but they can express it in other ways, even if it’s just banging really hard on a bucket.”
Dadanova agrees — the mentors she found through Culture For One gave her a safe space to explore her dreams when she felt stuck in residential care.
“As a foster kid, you’re lacking that community, and sometimes you can be distrusting of people,” Dadanova said. “I haven’t been able to find any other organization that made me feel like I was always welcomed. It had a huge impact on my life.” •
