New York, NY, August 26, 2014 – The Lulu & Leo Fund has awarded a grant to Cool Culture, it was announced today by Jennifer Goldschein, Executive Director, Lulu & Leo Fund. Cool Culture ensures that New York’s most diverse families with preschool-aged children have access to arts and culture as a way to increase literacy and learning in early childhood and to prepare children to succeed in school.
“The Lulu & Leo Fund is dedicated to inspiring, engaging, educating and growing the hearts and minds of children in need,” said Goldschein. “We have chosen this wonderful organization for a grant since it truly embodies the mission of our Fund. Cool Culture provides arts access for New York’s under-served families and empowers parents with consistent, long-term support to better engage and have fun with their children.”
“Cool Culture believes that parents hold the answers to many of the barriers to family involvement in children’s education,” said Candice Anderson, Executive Director, Cool Culture. “Partnership with the Lulu & Leo Fund will enable us to establish strong relationships between schools, parents and museums to increase the power of families to support their children’s learning and to improve outcomes for children living in poverty.”
The Lulu & Leo Fund will specifically support the Cool Culture program Literacy Through Culture (LTC). Serving low-income children and their parents in seven early childhood programs in the high need neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Chinatown and Harlem, the LTC program is grounded in the theory of complementary learning, which engages schools, community partners and families in aligning educational goals across settings to improve outcomes for children. Last year, the Brooklyn Museum, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Central Park Zoo, Children’s Museum of the Arts, The Jewish Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Rubin Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum at Eldridge Street and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum all participated in the program.
The grant from the Lulu & Leo Fund will enable Cool Culture to expand its Parent Ambassadors Program. In order to build strong, authentic, community-driven collaborations between parents, museum and education stakeholders, Cool Culture seeks to deepen its work with parents. The Parent Ambassadors Program is designed for parents of children in the Literacy Through Culture program to serve as leaders who can provide peer-to-peer support as they participate in creative family engagement activities that are novel to many parents participating in the program.
Cool Culture will be represented at the 2nd Annual Lulu & Leo Fund Fall Benefit: The Art of Healing at the Museum of the City of New York on Wednesday, November 5, 2014.
Founded by Marina and Kevin Krim in November 2012 in memory of their two children, the Lulu & Leo Fund is a public foundation primarily focused on healing through art. Last year, the Fund selected the Free Arts NYC program Parents and Children Together (PACT) as its first grantee. PACT is a theme-based art experience for families and its activities are designed to increase parental involvement and graduate in complexity to encourage positive forms of family communication and sustained teamwork.
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