In Crown Heights Brooklyn, the community suffers through four days of terrible riots fueled in part by ethnic and racial tensions. Amy Poux founds Working Playground, a youth and issues based organization, with the belief that from very little, children create work that is rich, original, and imaginative.

We create The Studio Program in partnership with East Side Community HIgh School, and launch it at seven additional schools, pairing teaching artists with classroom teachers. This new model of arts-integrated instruction, curriculum planning and professional development is featured at the International Conference on the Future of Arts Education with the NYC Department of Education.

After receiving the New York State Award of Merit, we are one of the few organizations selected by the Center for Arts Education and the New York Times Foundation to join the School Arts Rescue Initiative – a response to the 9/11 tragedy – implementing our Art of Recovery curriculum at 14 schools devastated by the attacks.

In the first year of Philip Courtney’s leadership, we co-found New Design High School, a progressive small high school that integrates the study of design and the arts into a four-year sequential curriculum.

New Design High School graduates its inaugural class with a 76% graduation rate – more than doubling that of the high school it replaced. Niclas Nagler establishes the Nagler Scholarship that awards a four-year $40,000 scholarship to one of our exemplary students each year.

We unveil our new name and identity – Urban Arts Partnership – at the Third Annual Urban Arts Festival, a day-long and evening showcase of outstanding original works by students from our 45 schools from across the city.

Urban Arts Partnership creates Fresh Prep to help students who repeatedly fail their state exams required to graduate from high school. With the overwhelming success of the pilot, we become the first and only arts organization to be awarded funding by The Robin Hood Foundation, a competitive NYC funder dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty.

Urban Arts Partnership is awarded a United States Department of Education Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination grant for further implementation of the Story Studio project, which provides arts-integrated literacy development for English Language Learner students in middle school.

The Black Eyed Peas’ Peapod Foundation and Adobe Foundation select UAP to run the first Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy in New York, based in our new headquarters space in SoHo. We expand to Los Angeles in partnership with the LA Unified School District.

We begin EASE – Everyday Arts for Special Education – to help students with disabilities develop their social development and reading skills. The program receives national recognition as a recipient of the competitive Investing in Innovation (i3) Federal grant award.

We begin scale up. The US Department of Education awards UAP three highly competitive grants to scale up Story Studio in New York City and Los Angeles, scale up EASE in New York City and Los Angeles, and pilot a new program called Fresh Ed for struggling middle school students in New York City. We partner with the NYC DOE to lead five Community Schools in this city-wide initiative to turn around struggling schools.

The Adobe Foundation scales up their support of UAP to help us expand our coding and Game Design program. UAP creates a new headquarters in a state-of-the-art learning facility and operations space in the Flatiron District. The organization completes a strategic plan to become the nation’s leader in arts-integrated education, and prepares for its next phase of growth.