Rural art space for kids to create, heal, and grow

What is this magical place for kids and their families, and why does it matter?

The new home of Tieton Arts & Humanities is a youth-focused community center in the Upper Yakima Valley that helps local kids learn to love learning, ask questions, feel happy and safe, and make up for lost learning time. We’re relatively small but mighty and our needs are pretty basic—so any contributions will have a HUGE impact.

During the Pandemic, instead of shrinking, we got brave and grew to meet increased community need. Thanks to state and private grant funding, we have been able to expand our art programming for local kids from weekly craft sessions in summer, to a robust year-round, co-curricular K-8 shebang that provides additional holistic, culturally responsive, student project-driven exposure to STEM+ESL+SEL through access to the arts, in a permanent space that families are actively claiming and making their own.

The kids in our program mostly speak Spanish at home, with parents who work in the fields cultivating, harvesting and packing fruit to ship around the world. It's scandalously taxing work any time of year, but especially during the pandemic. There are very few enrichment options or safe places for kids to play, so without help, they often end up staying home with Fortnite and TikTock as babysitters. When we make our space accessible to kids and families, the idyllic no-stoplight town with its zocalo square comes alive with activity and educative play, a strong preventative measure for the county's acute drug problems and gang violence that the town has mostly managed to hold at bay. 

Our new space is a refurbished mid-century modern auto repair station, close to the warehouses where parents work—sometimes double shifts—and adjacent to the neighborhoods where families live. Local Gen-Xers remember playing video games and pool here when they were kids, but the space sat dormant for decades (think "The Last Picture Show"), until 2020, when a community-minded local orchardist family bought the space and fixed it up. 

Grant funding to date has seeded funding the program itself with staff & art supplies, but it's earmarked in ways that haven’t let us invest in our physical space yet, which as in the tradition of Montessori, we see as The Third Teacher, integral to the learning process.

This project is totally the stuff of dreams, and we wholeheartedly invite your participation.

How will funding help?

Listed in order from dire need to attainable vision. These funds will be used imminently for furnishings that will be used for many years.

Immediate needs:

Bookshelves for our art supplies, games, and bilingual books.

Bar-height task chairs for the community coffee lounge space; a variety of outdoor chairs and tables to make the patio a viable community amenity this summer. These items will let the community have free access to our wifi, in a place where the digital divide is still painfully real.

Near-future needs:

After that, we'll start putting pennies toward our deck, pouring cement to level the floor and make the restrooms truly ADA accessible. We'll build a countertop for the computers along the wall that help kids and their families build digital literacy and prevent summer loss, getting the only computers they'll have access to this summer off of plastic folding tables.  

We need built-in cabinets with countertops and flat paper storage.  We'll pay for the much-beloved record player and collection we've been borrowing, and get a speaker system that will allow us to have decent sound for film screenings and live talks, so folks can hear better than what laptop speakers can do in a room that echoes.

We'll buy a shed that helps a local teenager start a bicycle and skateboard repair business on our lot, store garden tools, and put outdoor chairs away to securely protect them from the weather. (Longboards and bikes are viable ways to help youth get to the program, but there's only one bike shop in Yakima and it's not open when families are free to get to it.)

Future needs:

We would love to get a van or funding for bussing to pick up kids whose families work long shifts at the apple packing facility and can't get them to the program. 

We want a tuk-tuk as espresso cart, allowing an earned income model that could support more paid internships to help local kids use knowledge of their community to serve and grow it while building long-term job skills, instead of leaving to work fast food jobs.

Someday, it will be amazing to have a public charging station for electric vehicles at a back parking space, a risograph machine so teens can start a hyper-local newspaper and make zines, participating in and further diversifying Tieton's strong printmaking and publishing culture, much like OutletPDX.

Solar panels and a little radio antenna on the roof, for a tiny local radio station with programming in Spanish and English. 

Thank you for dreaming with us! Please feel free to reach out to us at crearte@tietonarts.org with questions & ideas!