Our Mission

Youth Art Exchange sparks a shared creative practice between professional artists and public high school students, furthering youth as leaders, thinkers, and artists in San Francisco.

Our Strategic Plan

During a challenging year and a half of navigating a global pandemic, YAX developed a plan led by a Strategic Planning Committee of Advisory Board members and staff with significant guidance and input from our Racial Equity Committee. The Strategic Planning Committee hosted visioning sessions with the faculty, youth, Advisory Board, the Racial Equity Committee and staff, and developed vision areas and priorities on which to focus on for the next 5 years. 

The plan’s priorities emerged to reflect the desire to grow and expand the organization in 6 vision areas making sure that Racial Equity is at the center of everything that we do: 

Our Vision

Our vision is that every public high school student in San Francisco has a voice and agency in our city. We believe being exposed to the arts at a pivotal age and developing a strong connection to the arts through learning, creating, and making give youth tools to express themselves, exchange with others, and shape the world around them. We want spaces buzzing with the creative energy of professional artists and youth working together to make art, hang out, and build community – which we believe will make our city more connected, resilient, and reflective of all those woven in its fabric. Simply said, art changes lives.

In five years, YAX will have autonomous, sustainable, accessible spaces that fit all program needs both in the Excelsior and Mission Neighborhoods. YAX will have powerful visibility in San Francisco as a written-about, celebrated, creative and inclusive community arts institution. YAX will create vibrant places where people feel they belong and feel they contribute to a thriving, creative community. We will continue to serve a strong percentage of black and brown students. We will have full time faculty with benefits that make a living from working with us. We will have strong partnerships throughout San Francisco with organizations and individuals who are invested in our work, and therefore have a funding model that is primarily based on unrestricted funds from earned income and philanthropic funding.

Our Need

Our need is for all youth to have equitable access to the arts. Youth need art. Youth need spaces to explore who they are, voice who they are becoming, and express what they want to advocate for and contribute to their communities. The arts have been proven to be instrumental in interrupting the status quo, rebuilding communities, boosting the economy, creating careers, encouraging civic engagement, and aiding in mental well being.  Art is essential to understanding ourselves and others, building connections between people, and creating cultural and social justice interventions that spark change. The urgency of these needs and the challenge of delivering them have grown since the onset of the pandemic.  

While San Francisco’s burgeoning economy values creativity and innovation, there are barriers to accessing arts in our city, especially for youth, working artists, and communities of color and low income people. Approximately 86% of SFUSD’s 15,800 public high school students are youth of color. As schools face budget cuts, their arts programming is often the first to go and extracurricular arts programs are often cost- and logistically-prohibitive for low income families juggling transportation and a lack of resources. Beyond the disparities in access to arts for public school students, arts careers and exhibitions for working artists and curators have remained predominantly white and affluent. San Francisco youth need to see themselves in the arts too. 

Our Solution

Our solution is to disrupt who has traditional access to the arts, starting with youth and their immediate communities. Our work at the intersection of the arts and youth development fosters a shared creative practice between practicing artists and public high school students, amplifying often-marginalized voices and giving youth vital free access to the arts. Our work centers creative spaces, creative practice, creative exchange, and creative inclusion. And this access extends to students’ families, friends, and neighbors.

Our Impact

Our impact has been strong for more than 20 years. Since 2000, YAX has led community arts education in San Francisco with more than 15,000 students, 150 faculty artists, and 100,000 audience members as part of our community. Every year we invest nearly $3,000 per student to ensure free access to quality art programs. We serve a strong percentage of black and brown students (30% Latinx, 20% Black, 30% Asian, 10% multi-ethnic and/or multi-racial, 10% white), and our leadership demographics are reflective of the youth we engage. Many alumni have also gone on to teach and work at YAX. Not all youth go on to be artists or participate in creative sector careers, but what they take with them from YAX gives them a strong, transferable foundation for their future. The impact of YAX is seen through the four pillars of our work as well as from our extensive network of alumni and their stories—many of whom are making impacts in vastly different career areas.

1. Sustain Creative spaces: We provide programming through our arts hub [x] space in the Excelsior, YAX Art Studios in the Mission, and spaces citywide with innovative partnerships and projects that shape the physical and cultural landscape of San Francisco.

2. Foster Creative practice: Through free programming,  young printmakers, young architects, young filmmakers, young performers, and more are learning and experimenting through the arts while working together with professional artists.

3. Develop Creative exchange: Through multidisciplinary programming, youth develop technical and leadership skills and apply them through youth-led projects, creatively contributing their perspective to the community.

4. Practice Creative inclusion:  We are seeing fewer artists of color contributing to an expanding and flourishing arts environment in San Francisco. To reverse this trend, accessible, affordable arts experiences need to be available for everyone.We believe that art changes lives  and are committed to racial equity. We prioritize hiring POC staff and faculty to reflect our youth demographics. 

History

Youth Art Exchange (YAX) was founded in 2000 as Out of Site Youth Arts Center by an architect, Beth Rubenstein, and a visual artist, Jennifer Stuart, in response to growing needs for arts education for public high school students. As practicing artists and educators, YAX’s founders recognized the power of arts education to open doors for young people while the opportunities for public school students were rapidly diminishing. These youth, primarily low-income students and students of color, were those that were most lacking opportunities to deeply engage with the arts. YAX was founded to fill this gap in access to the arts, which is increasingly relevant with growing disparities in the city.

With over 20 years of youth-centered arts learning, our staff and faculty have expertise in program delivery that supports and enhances youth development. Our work at the intersection of arts education and youth development has expanded with the needs of our constituencies. Our numbers of arts disciplines and students citywide has grown, as well as the addition of workforce-skill based summer intensives, a summer STEM architecture-based intensive for rising 9th graders, in-school classes, annual arts education convenings, and an active Youth Advisory Board. In 2018, we launched [x]space arts hub in the Excelsior as a new chapter in creating artistic exchange with the broader community. In 2019, we began our partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco to hold programs at the Columbia Park Clubhouse in the Mission.