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Healing Arts for Kids
Young Audiences of MA provides a unique arts education program for hospital-based children. The program offers an arts agenda in hospital settings to stimulate children's love of learning and to experience the healing power of the arts. Through theater, storytelling and music, the Healing Arts for Kids program provides hospitals with live performances by professional artists as well as performance related curriculum/activity materials for the patients, families and staff. The program also provides medical staff with a highly successful workshop in the therapeutic use of storytelling with pediatric patients.
This initiative is one that requires sensitivity to acutely and chronically ill children’s unique needs. Artists have been selected based upon specific art forms and oriented to the special needs of hospitalized children.
Integrating artistic activities into children’s lives when they are unable to attend school encourages reading, writing, listening, self-expression, and social interaction. The smiles, the laughter, the reaching out to participate with the artists - all encourage healing through the arts.
Young Audiences is currently collaborating with five Boston area hospitals and with Horizons for Homeless Children. Additional community outreach includes joint programming between a hospital and a local elementary school. As a community building opportunity the performances are bridging connections between children, their families, hospital staff and artists through a program that enriches the children’s time while hospitalized and beyond.
For more information, please contact the Healing Arts for Kids, Project Director, Gail Zarren at gzarren@yamass.org or 617-629-9262 x24.
Healing Arts for Kids Program Received National Award
Date: March 8, 2010
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"Young Audiences' performers inspired our children so much, that those who could walk, stood up and danced, and those in wheelchairs were smiling, happy to clap their hands, shake their heads and vocalize to follow the melody..."
- Staff, Franciscan Hospital for Children, Kennedy Day School, Boston
"Images of our patients come to mind - the rapt attention of a 7 year old girl in the final stages of a life-threatening disease sitting in the front row, mesmerized by the extraordinary sights and sounds (of the performer)...and the surge of energy from a young teen, chronically ill and weakened by the struggle with her disease. The Healing Arts performances have become great respites for the children and parents, easing their tension and giving them some moments of peace."
- Ginny Finn, Director of Child Life Services, Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center, Boston
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