In January, Amy Young was anxiously awaiting the arrival of a new album featuring songs written by Oklahoma City children.
As the founder and director of SixTwelve, a community learning center in the heart of Oklahoma City's Paseo District, Young had planned to help two local bands create their own album, but the pandemic that hit in March changed all that.
"I took the money, and we engaged with musicians, mostly from Oklahoma City and Norman and some from other states, to record songs that were written by kids. We banded together with another organization in Oklahoma City called SWAT Meet, Inc., which teaches kids how to write record and perform their own music. We banded together with them and organized 20 different bands performing 20 songs written by the kids."
The music was mixed and mastered by Jared Evans of Black Watch Studio into an album called "Building Together." In January, those vinyl albums were pressed and shipped to Oklahoma City.
"It is so good," said Young.
The fundraising album was one of the many creative endeavors that SixTwelve offers as a community education center.
"Community education is designed to foster a lifelong love of learning. We have a preschool, and during normal times we have an after-school program, adult workshops, events and residencies," Young said. "We do camps for kids during the breaks and everything focuses on creativity and sustainability. We have a focus on arts, a community garden, and a community kitchen, as well as apartments upstairs for the artists residents we bring in."
Since opening in 2015, SixTwelve has hosted 16 different residencies, either in Oklahoma City or in Savannah, Georgia. The residencies host artists, writers, filmmakers, chefs dancers, musicians, and others who are willing to share their knowledge through educational programs like camps or workshops.
However, during the 2020 pandemic, SixTwelve had to cut back their offerings to just pre-K and remote residencies. The work in the community garden, however continued.
BUILDING AN ARTS CENTER
Young taught elementary school for eight years before moving to Oklahoma City in 2006 to work as an education curator for the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. She always had a dream of starting an arts center, and in 2010, she left the museum to do just that.
"I've known since I was a kid that I really wanted to have a school. I also really loved music and the arts in general, and I really wanted kids to have an educational experience that gave them exposure to the arts because arts were being taken out of the schools," Young said.
"I started this community center with a focus on education and arts and sustainability. We bought the place in 2010, and it took five years to rezone and renovate it with the city."
Located on the corner of NW 29th and Lee, SixTwelve opened in 2015 with after school programs and camps. During normal times, SixTwelve offers a PreK Program, an After School Program, Camps, Adult Workshops, Events, Residencies, Community Garden, Urban Chickens, a Community Kitchen for teaching and food prep, an outdoor performance stage, two residency apartments and a studio. Young started the preschool in the fall of 2015, and a couple of years later, The Oklahoma City Girls Art School held its after-school program at the center.
"They quickly outgrew our space in a couple of years and moved on to their own place. So we started our own after school program, and it was going strong until this past spring when we had to close everything down. We moved everything to online until the summer, and then spent the summer just trying to take care of the gardens because we could be outside."
Young had learned how important it was for kids to be in nature and to be outside, but also to understand where their food came from. Because SixTwelve has a focus on sustainability, it began offering monthly outdoor gardening workshops that have continued during the pandemic.
"Everything focuses on how to grow your own food and how to have a garden, so we focus on soil nutrition, water conservation and collection, permaculture and using what you have to direct water to where you want the gardens to be," she said.
"All of our plants are either edible or medicinal, and our trees are fruit producing. Everything is on the outside of our fence so that our neighbors can take food if they need it. We try to encourage people to volunteer in the gardens if they do take the food."
Pre-COVID, SixTwelve also began offering cooking classes for both adults and children.
"It took 10 years to raise the funds to get the kitchen. We finally have a teaching kitchen, which the kids can use or adults can use. But this year, during the summer, I had an outdoor classroom put in so that we could have our pre-K outside. We reduced all the programs just to pre-K to keep them safe and not have too many people in the building," Young said.
"it's been a really good semester and the kids have done some work in the gardens as well. They helped plant the seeds and watched the food grow. Then they take it inside and cook it in the kitchen so they actually their food from yard to fork."
The coming year remains up in the air as far as what kind of programming SixTwelve can offer, but Young said the mission remains the same. The Pre-K class, which is limited to eight students, will continue through the summer.
"Hopefully, this vaccine will bring a little bit more hope for bringing pre-K and after-school programming back in the fall. We're just gonna take it one day at a time and see what is possible," Young said.
SixTwelve is funded through a combination of tuition and class fees, donations and grants. Tuition is based on a sliding scale based on what people can pay.
Just recently, SixTwelve unveiled a new art installation that went up at the beginning of the semester called the SixTwelve Garden of Light that was made possible by a donation from the Kirkpatrick Family Fund and matched by the Young family.
"That was put into motion last December, and I'm so grateful for it because it brought some light and wonder and curiosity to the neighborhood and to the property," Young said.
"Those are things that we definitely want to support for lifelong learning. Curiosity is one of the most important things in life."
For more information about SixTwelve, to purchase the fundraising album or to enroll in the Pre-K class, visit sixtwelve.org.
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