Purchase Tickets

A Reason To Survive (ARTS)

A Reason To Survive (ARTS)

Matt D’Arrigo has always used arts as a way to heal when facing hard times. “I wanted to provide the same opportunity to kids who didn’t have exposure to the arts,” he says. Which is why, in 2001, he launched A Reason To Survive Inc. (ARTS) as way to offer free arts programming for children who face adversity.

The program started small, with a $5,000 donation. With that, he launched ARTS by taking art projects to the Ronald McDonald House, which provides a “home away from home” for families of children receiving treatment at hospitals. Next, ARTS offered the same service to Rady Children’s Hospital. In time, ARTS partnered with a slew of San Diego organizations, offering arts to children who face challenges such as foster care, homelessness, physical and mental difficulties, poverty and the hardships of having a parent in the military.

In each case, ARTS’ volunteer mentors provided weekly arts projects, giving the children a chance to convey their emotions, feelings and frustrations. And the program was—and remains—free for the kids, families and partner sites.

Then, in February, D’Arrigo realized a longtime dream for ARTS. “We opened up an art center, the Pat D’Arrigo ARTS Center, where kids can come and experience all the art forms,” he says. The 7,000-square-foot facility, located at the NTC Promenade in Point Loma, includes a media arts room, performance space, painting studio, music room, ceramics studio, mixed-media and printmaking studio and a children’s art gallery.

The center allows the majority of the arts programs to be offered at the center through Saturday and after-school programs. However, with this development came the need to transport children. For that, ARTS has vans, called Van Go! Those vans, D’Arrigo explains, “get kids to and from the arts center who don’t have transportation, and they get kids to cultural events in the community.”

Now with a $650,000 annual operating budget, ARTS has seven staff members and about 100 volunteers who will serve about 10,000 kids this year. With such expansion, the mission has grown too. “Our goal is to heal, inspire and empower,” says D’Arrigo. “We heal through the artistic process. We inspire by taking kids to arts and culture events in the community, showing them possibilities. And [we empower by hiring] some of the kids at the art center and gallery, giving them life skills.”