Over the course of her undergraduate career, CCA student sara lankutis (Printmaking 2013) worked at ALICE Arts, a youth arts organization in Oakland; Kala Art Institute, a printmaking and multimedia studio in Berkeley; and Creative Growth in Oakland, where she worked directly with artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities. She got these jobs through CCA CONNECTS (originally called Community Student Fellows), an initiative run by CCA’s Center for Art and Public Life. Lankutis was paid by CCA, not the work sites—indeed, CONNECTS jobs are among the college’s highest-paid workstudy positions. And in the process, she learned the fine art of balancing studio time with work time. “Art work and community work are absolutely mutually reinforcing. All of my worksites were constantly buzzing with activity. I was so inspired by my exposure to the different processes and ideas going on. I always left work wanting to make more of my own art!” Over the course of the 2013–14 school year, the CONNECTS program will hook up 30 CCA students like Lankutis to work a total of 8,000 hours at 30 different organizations around the Bay Area. The partner sites range from design and architecture firms to schools and art organizations: from the San Francisco Arts Commission to Salem Lutheran Home (an assisted-living facility for seniors in Oakland), SPUR (a research, education, and advocacy nonprofit in San Francisco), and Architecture for Humanity (a nonprofit design services firm). GETTING CREATIVE AT CREATIVITY EXPLORED The Center coined a new term for these jobs—“externships”—to express the idea of going outside of school to work in new and different environments. CCA externs at Creativity Explored (a visual art center in San Francisco for people with disabilities) work directly with the disabled artists, and most will tell you it was challenging at first, but rewarding in the end. Studio manager Francis Kohler explains: “Our artists are utilizing a specific type of creativity in the production of their work, and this requires that the externs be just as creative in assisting them.”
Numerous former CCA externs have continued on at Creativity Explored as substitute teachers. This is a clear and quantifiable positive outcome, Kohler says, but he also observes that “the
more durable and further-reaching successes can be much more subtle and slowburning. For instance, in my own initial encounters with Creativity Explored as a volunteer, I realized that I had been unconsciously carrying around quite a bit of misinformation about people with disabilities. After interacting with the artists every week, I quickly shed my preconceptions as well as being totally won over by their complete lack of pretense. The artists, the studio environment, and the art are so incredible.”
Above: sar a l ankutis at k al a art institute
CONNECTS externs, he presumes, experience a similar transformation while working there. “Of course I can’t generalize about CCA students. Many perceptions regarding people with disabilities haven’t changed much, but the world is considerably different than it was 20 years ago when I first encountered Creativity Explored.” FULFILLING IMPORTANT NEEDS
rebecca wolfe , program manager of CONNECTS, stresses that the program isn’t solely about job placement. “We very carefully match the student to the site, then provide partnership support, community building, networking, and professional development opportunities
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