Help Bring Ballet Hispánico to MLK High Schools

New York City Council Member Gale Brewer of District 6 needs your help to enhance arts education at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Complex on Amsterdam Avenue for the 2023-2024 school year. Council Member Brewer has taken the complex, located just steps outside of our district, under her wing to transform and fix it up for its students and approached us for help. Inside is a wonderful dance studio that is unused, and with your support, Ballet Hispánico’s Community Arts Partnerships (CAP) can change that. 

Hailed by the Ford Foundation in 2020 as one of “America’s Cultural Treasures,” Ballet Hispánico, an organization on the Upper West Side, currently manages programs in 45 schools citywide —they know how to do this! The BH CAP team can select and provide artists’ residencies for experienced dance instructors who love kids and can teach traditional, social, urban, and/or contemporary dance forms with a particular focus on Afro-Latinidad cultural contexts. For six hours a week, scores of students in the incredibly diverse student bodies at the MLK high schools will create movements and learn dances inspired by their own personal stories, by Ballet Hispánico repertory, and Latinx traditions from working Latin dance artists. There was a great piece on the organization featured on CBS Mornings, which you can view here. 

The schools of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Complex at 122 Amsterdam Ave include Manhattan/Hunter Science High School, High School for Law, Advocacy, & Community Justice, The Maxine Greene HS for Imaginative Inquiry, High School of Arts and Technology Urban Assembly School for Media Studies, and Special Music School.

We hope you will help fill that empty dance studio and support bringing these dance instructors to our neighborhood and local students. The fundraising goal is $40,000. Click here to donate! 

For more information, contact Natalia Mesa, Ballet Hispánico Community Engagement Director, at nmesa@ballethispanico.org.

Photo Credit: Ballet Hispánico