A Summer to Remember at HSA
Summer Blaze
On Friday, August 21, we celebrated Summer Blaze, HSA’s signature summer celebration and the culmination of our Summer Dance Intensive. Dancers took the stage to share everything they built over the summer, with family, friends, and supporters filling the house to cheer them on.
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Sharing Sessions & Open Houses
Thank you to the families, donors, and community members who joined us for our summer camp sharing sessions and open houses. There was something especially powerful about celebrating Harlem’s heritage in Harlem itself — watching our students bring the neighborhood’s own legends of stage, screen, and page to life on our stages, for an audience that included their families and neighbors.
From sharing sessions to open houses, families filled the room to see what their students had built over the summer.
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Building Skills, Building Futures
This summer, HSA’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) placed young people as counselors across our summer camp sessions, giving them real work experience alongside our students. At the same time, a separate cohort of teens took part in Lead the Change, a series of workshops that went beyond the studio to build skills for a lifetime — exploring self-identity and confidence in “Who Am I?”, building financial literacy in “Building the Bag,” mapping out college and career paths in “Design Your Future,” and working through mental health and healing in facilitated conversations with the support of the arts. The series culminated in student-produced Public Service Announcements, giving these young people a real platform to tell their own stories.
“Watching our SYEP counselors and the Lead the Change cohort work side by side this summer was a reminder of what’s possible when city government, the local community, and an institution like ours come together. That kind of collaboration is exactly what leads to strong outcomes for our young people — real skills, real confidence, and real empowerment.” — Mona Lisa Perez, COO, Harlem School of the Arts
None of this happens without the support of our community. Gifts to HSA make this kind of whole-student support possible — helping us meet young people not just as artists, but as people building a future.
