Community Art Center

Founded in 1937, the mission of the Community Art Center is to cultivate an engaged community of youth whose powerful artistic voices transform their lives, their neighborhoods and their worlds. The Community Art Center has propelled close to 8000 Cambridge youth to develop themselves artistically, academically and socially. We do this by providing a combined total of approximately 3000 program hours per year through three program areas the School Age Child Care Program, our Teen Programs (including Teen Media and Public Art) and our Community Programs which include the Do It Your Damn Self!! National Youth Film Festival – the oldest youth curated film festival in the country. The Community Art Center’s arts education programs and public art initiatives promote knowledge of self, connection to history, acknowledgement of place, and expression of differences and shared values. During a time of rapid change and economic inequality, the Community Art Center generates art that redistributes agency, promotes a right to co-create culture and allows communities to build a collective future.

In the coming year, the Community Art Center will pilot the Creative Careers Pipeline Initiative and begin the planning phase of the Port Arise Institute. Winner of a Coming Up Taller award in 2006, recipient of the Citizen’s Bank Champion in Action and selected to be part of the Barr Klarman Massachusetts Arts Initiative in 2018, the Community Art Center maintains a long history of quality, arts-based youth development programming. With new strategic partnerships in place for the coming year both in the public and private sectors, the Community Art Center is poised to achieve new levels of engagement and investment.