Cole Florey poses for students in the painting class at Sitka Fine Arts Camp adult session, in the Yaw Arts Center on the Sheldon Jackson Campus. Alaska Arts Southeast, which runs the Fine Arts Camp, received a $350,000 grant to help with the restoration of Yaw. (KCAW photo/Ed Ronco)
A $350,000 grant to Alaska Arts Southeast, which runs the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, will help the organization continue to restore the campus it inherited two years ago.
It’s part of a national program called “Artplace.” The Chicago-based group is funded by a dozen or so of the nation’s largest private foundations. It sends money to groups it feels are not only developing a particular project, but are also improving their overall community.
Inside the Yaw Arts Center, behind a door marked “Music,” teacher Andrea Burck is teaching a group of elementary-age students to drum and sing. Some of the students are a fidgety, and keeping them in synch is a challenge.
“Now are we all doing the same beat? Or are some people going faster or slower?” she asks her students.
“Faster!” shout a few.
This “mini-camp” with elementary students is followed by two weeks with middle school students, then another two with a high school crowd. More than 700 students will set foot on the Sheldon Jackson campus this summer, and most of them will pass through Yaw.
One of the hopes for the Artplace grant is that when the summer is over, these hallways will still have people in them.
“If we have more space that we can use during the year, then we can have more activities,” said Roger Schmidt, executive director of Alaska Arts Southeast.
“This grant was a natural fit to start bringing another building online, and that’s the Yaw Art Center, a place where there can be studio space, there can be classroom space, there can be gallery space, and it can be a vibrant arts center for our community,” he said.
Schmidt says creating that environment – where people are able to practice something that matters to them, or are attracted to town because they can – improves the community’s quality of life.
And more and more, quality of life translates to economic development.
“The arts are something that, as a community, as an economic force, we haven’t talked a lot about. Quietly, it’s been a huge force,” he said. “Just alone in this year, this campus, we’ve put a half million dollars of cash that’s going directly into paying contractors and workers to do restoration work. That money is generated by the heart, by the passion that the arts create in people.”
Ask Thor Christianson. The Sitka Assembly member was on the organization’s board before he was elected to office. And in the 1970s, he was a camper here.
“I was OK at the trumpet. For a while there I started to get good and then I drifted away from it,” he said. “But at theater, I think I held my own.”
On this day, he’s standing next to Allen Auditorium, taking a break from a CPR class he’s teaching to camp staff. As a former camper and a former board member, Christianson says he’s just happy something he enjoyed is still around so he can share it with his kids.
But as an Assembly member, he asks a different set of questions.
“What’s the return on investment?” Christianson said. “How much money, and nontangibles does it bring to the city, for what we put into it?”
The city exempts most of the campus from property tax. That’s required by state law for educational institutions. And it granted an exemption for the Hames Center, under the city’s community purpose rule.
“And I suspect we get more than that back, just in the sales tax revenue generated by the economic activity here,” he said.
Sheldon Jackson College was a private institution, but the city took a keen interest in its fate when it shut down in 2007. City leaders discussed options for the campus, took over management of the college’s fitness center, and even courted officials from the University of Dubuque in Iowa, which considered taking over part of the campus. The Dubuque deal fell through, and when the campus was donated to the Fine Arts Camp, it became up to the organization and members of the community make the 20 buildings usable again.
“And it was interesting to watch on the Assembly,” Christianson said. “When this was first starting there was a lot of skepticism. Now, you can’t help but look over here and say ‘It’s happened. It’s happening.’ The amount of community support makes this much easier, from a city standpoint, to support. Not to mention they’re not asking for any money from us. It’s a win-win for the city.”
The journey this campus has taken in the last two years is a lot like that music class we visited.
A bunch of people got together, found a certain rhythm, and in a way, learned to sing the same song. And as the campus develops, its supporters hope the tune is catchy.
