Snow City Arts

Snow City Arts (SCA) was founded in 1998 to deliver standards-based arts learning to children and youth in hospitals. We aim to bridge the learning gap that young people encounter when they miss school due to short-term or long-term hospitalization as well as chronic health care needs. Today, our hospital partners include Rush University Children’s Hospital, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Children’s Hospital University of Illinois, and Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital. We place professional Teaching Artists in both inpatient and outpatient pediatric unites to engage children and young adults in arts-based workshops in a wide range of mediums: creative writing, media arts, music, theatre, and visual arts. While artmaking in the hospital can be considered recreational or therapeutic work, SCA is entirely unique in its focus on arts learning in a clinical setting. Our Teaching Artists collaborate closely with SCA program leadership and the Child Life staff within our partner hospitals to create and deliver a rigorous, standards-based arts curriculum that is scalable to serve each child’s individual needs. As many students miss many hours of school instruction while hospitalized, we create detailed reports that children and their parents may elect to submit to their respective schools for class or attendance credit.

Many established institutions have recognized the quality and value of SCA’s important work. In 2006, the White House and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities recognized SCA as one of the 15 best youth programs in the United States, honoring us with the prestigious Coming Up Taller Award. In 2008, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized SCA as an “outstanding arts in healthcare” program, profiling SCA as a national Best Practices organization. We were honored with a visit from NEA Chairwoman Jane Chu in June of 2015. Finally, SCA was honored with the Make It Better Philanthropy – Arts Award in 2015.