REACH Studio Art Center hangs tight with grants and donations

Despite being closed to the public thanks to coronavirus mandates and having to refund registration fees from its spring classes, REACH Studio Art Center, a low-cost art school for youths and young adults, is hanging on with funding from grants and donors. So far, REACH hasn’t had to lay off any of its employees.

With the present seemingly on hold for the majority of Michigan businesses and organizations, all it can do now is plan for the future.

“Currently we’re in the troughs of contacting all of our students and issuing refunds for their registration fees,” director Alice Brinkman said. “We’re taking care of business and trying to strategize ways to stay in touch with our students and our community.”

Brinkman said she and the rest of REACH’s staff discussed long-distance and remote online teaching opportunities, but decided for the time being to hold off on creating a large-scale online education plan. Instead, the focus is on buckling down on preparations for its summer camp programs, though the certainty of that as coronavirus updates rollout might also be up in the air.

“This time of year, normally, we’d be collecting registrations online for our summer camp. But right now our registration is very quiet,” Brinkman said. “We’ll most likely be postponing the start of our camp and having a shorter season than usual. But of course that’s all tentative — we have to stay fluid.”

“If we’re not running programs, we’re not hiring teaching artists, so our expenses are going down,” Brinkman added.

Brinkman is relieved that the staff is all still on payroll, and she is actively looking for ways to help continue to keep REACH stable. REACH was one of 60 recipients of a $10,000 Lansing Economic Area Partnership grant, and earlier this year received another $10,000 from the City of Lansing for its weekly “Drop In, Make Art” program. Though REACH is obviously unable to host the program, Brinkman hopes REACH will be able to keep the grant.

“Because we’re a nonprofit a lot of our funding comes from grants and individual contributions. I still have to reach out to some of our grant funders to find out how to get extensions on grant projects,” Brinkman said. “A lot of our tried and true donors have sent in donations now, when they’d usually donate later in the year. We’re putting one foot in front of the other.”

Brinkman applied for the Paycheck Protection Program and is finding the process more arduous and less streamlined than it’s been touted. “That’s been really frustrating. Our bank, Fifth Third Bank, still does not have its online system for accepting applications to that program operational. I’ve put in my request but I have yet to actually have our application submitted,” Brinkman said. “It seems like something dumped on the banks, like ‘Here take this!’ They’re trying their best.”