Visionary is a small business committed to helping in big ways. Whether it’s our free exams for Howard Brown Health Center patients, free clinics at The Broadway Youth Center, bringing complimentary eye care worldwide with VOSH/International, or helping our Andersonville and Loop neighbors, we know what a difference community can make.
Our newest step toward community giving comes through our membership with the Private Eye Care Association of America (PECAA), who has chosen an incredible organization for their 2019 giving campaign.
PECAA Gives has selected Anthropos Arts as its 2019 beneficiary, and we couldn’t be happier to support it. PECAA’s website describes the beautiful and important work Anthropos Arts is doing for low-income and at-risk youth below. Read on to see why we jumped at the chance to support them, and why Visionary is donating 5% of the quarterly rebate funds it receives from PECAA to Anthropos Arts.
Anthropos Arts, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization, was founded to address a need in Austin for high-quality music education for low-income students. They are committed to connecting at-risk youth with professional musicians to cultivate confidence, integrity and life-skills through musical instruction and mentorship.
100% of their students are from low-income families, ranging from homeless, food-insecure, to just short of meeting the basic needs for survival. The students are, on average, 7 times as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to still be poor/unemployed by age 35, and 63 times more likely to have an adult crime on their record than someone with a Bachelor’s degree. These are just a few of many daunting statistics showing how the odds are stacked against the students they serve.
Anthropos began in the Spring of 1998 at Travis and Reagan High School, with 2 workshops and 15 students getting free lessons. Since then, they have gone on to provide over 18,000 music lessons to students living in poverty, have offered over 100 incredible workshops in Title I schools with world-class and Grammy-winning artists, have held over 150 public student performances, have conducted over 10,000 lessons and collaborated with world-renowned artists. All of this has come at a $0 cost to the students, families, schools, or districts that they serve.
Students get free instruction and mentoring from some of the best artists in the country, performance opportunities at Austin’s best-known venues and exposure to a wide range of music as both an audience and a performer.
For 12 years, 100% of the Anthropos Arts students have graduated High School and more than 90% have gone on to college on scholarship. For 5 of the last 6 years, 100% of grads (15-20 each year) have gone on to college. Twelve out of 18 of the 2017 class received full-rides to four-year universities – all of them the first in their families to do so.
