We’re pleased to announce a new corporate social responsibility partnership with a leading national distributor of art supplies to the educational sector, SAX® Arts & Crafts, a division of School Specialty. 

Please take a moment and enjoy this delightful short video that Sax made to introduce our new partnership

http://blog.schoolspecialty.com/art-craft/announcing-partnership-fresh-artists/

Perfect fit: Fresh Artists and Sax

Located in Greenville, Wisconsin, Sax is a perfect fit for Fresh Artists as we share a passion for art education and inspiring the artist in every student. With the strong support of Sax Arts & Crafts, Fresh Artists will be able to deliver even more quality art supplies to children in schools struggling with severe cutbacks in arts funding. Together, we will change the lives of children, art teachers — and communities!

The creative mind behind this novel partnership is Sheri Yerges, Marketing Manager for Art, for Sax Arts & Crafts. When she discovered Fresh Artists at our booth at the annual National Art Education Association conference in Chicago last spring, she saw the opportunity to design a corporate social responsibility partnership with us.

After numerous phone calls back and forth, they were “all in” with a broad partnership that generously delivers product, expertise, and financial support to our growing organization. They bound an 8-page pamphlet about Fresh Artists and the programs we offer poor schools into their Summer 2016 Back To School catalog that was mailed to more than 220,000 art teachers throughout the USA!

On-site visit leads to promotional video

They flew their senior creative and marketing heads out to Philadelphia to visit our studio for three days to learn about our programs and our needs serving poor schools throughout the country.  Their videographer, Tom Racine, shot hours of footage and School Specialty Social Media Marketing Manager, Adam Halfmann, took hundreds of still photos of our corporate installations and our art teachers working on projects with youngsters in our new Collab studio space.  We all got to know each other and share stories about how art not only enriches children’s lives, but in more than a few cases, saves their lives. 

We thoroughly enjoyed taking our new friends all over town to visit corporate art installations of the children’s large reproductions – from the 3200 sf Fresh Artists gallery in the Comcast Center to the 140,000 sf installation of our children’s artwork at Health Partners Plans, an award-winning health maintenance organization. They even got to visit the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall!

Creativity knows no bounds

During their visit, we were delighted to discover that Mick Walsh, School Specialty’s Creative Director, has an amazingly cool skill known as “visual recording”, rapidly illustrating the content of meetings and presentations on a whiteboard! We begged him to do a short visual story of how Fresh Artists works…and word has it that Mick’s got something cooking for us. Watch this space! 

We look forward to hearing from a goodly number of the almost quarter-million art teachers who will learn about Fresh Artists through Sax’ kindness….and reach out to us for grants of free art supplies, free program kits like Chip Art, Mini-Masterpieces and Clothesline Art Sales, and to submit artwork from their classes to be considered for our national collection of children’s art that “goes to work” to help other children!

We thank Sax Arts & Crafts for reaching out to help is amplify the impact of Fresh Artists and the children with whom we serve and partners.  Our mutual goal is to increase the number of children we can empower through their art, to increase all childrens’ access to a quality public education and increase the volume of much-needed art supplies and innovative art programs Fresh Artists can deliver to schools in desperate need.