Our goal is to equip at-risk and underprivileged youth with the skills, abilities, and the sense of self-worth they'll need to make good life decisions about education, career, family and relationships, and also to buffer them from the risk factors that threaten their progression into productive adulthood - factors such as the easy availability of drugs, physical abuse and neglect, neighborhood violence, poverty and low neighborhood attachment, negative peer pressure, and early academic failure, to name a few.

Consider some statistics:
• Every school day, more than 7000 students drop out of HIgh School. Annually, that adds up to about 1.3 million students who will not graduate as scheduled.
• High School dropouts are three and one half time more likely than high school graduates to be arrested, and more than eight times as likely to be incarcerated.
• According to U.S. Department of Justice and Georgia Bureau of Prison's statistics, the percentage of inmates in state and federal prisons who are high-school dropouts is approximately 75 percent.

For at-risk youth, truancy and school failure are the two most significant predictors of delinquent behavior, according to U.S. Department of Justice research.

Youth arts programs offer safe, engaging and constructive environments for young people who lack adult supervision during nonschool hours, a time when they are most vulnerable to community violence and gang recruitment.

Arts Participation = Improved Academic Performance
A longitudinal study of 25,000 students reveals that involvement in the arts leads to greater success in school, regardless of socioecononic status. The study links significant cognitive and developmental benefits to involvement in the arts:

Arts Programs = Higher Rates of Graduation
At-risk youth participating in arts and prevention programs are staying in school and graduating. Participants in the following programs have higher rates of graduation and college attendance than comparable youth in their community: