History

The NLArts story began in 2003 when a few moms met to discuss the lack of school options in the growing Northern Liberties neighborhood. The group surveyed parents to better understand their needs, and the data showed they wanted a neighborhood school with innovative programs for all learning styles. With this, Monika Kreidie and Jenifer Trachtman led a team to create a charter school that reflected the neighborhood's artistic heritage.

They envisioned an arts-based school that used creative problem-solving, where local artists would work with elementary school educators to meet each child's individual needs. As the group grew, it formed working committees and received a planning grant to develop a charter school application for the School District of Philadelphia.

In 2004, the group submitted its first charter application to the School District of Philadelphia, proposing the Northern Liberties Charter School, to be located on the 800 block of American Street, now home to KieranTimberlake.

The School District was interested, but thought the location overlapped too much with the catchment of Kearney Elementary. The feedback was to re-apply for a school in the Port Richmond area. We honored the request and resubmitted a charter application the following year. Although The Northern Liberties Charter School was a finalists for charter status, our application was eventually turned down, in part, due to a strong lobby from The Lab Charter School which was then located in Northern Liberties.  

Undefeated, the Northern Liberties Charter School group, which now included the support of over 100 families, met in May 2006 to decide what to do next. The steering committee thought it would be best to take the money that was raised for the school and put it into a community arts program that would host Saturday workshops starting in the fall of 2006.  We made a pact that we would run programs until the money we had in the bank ran out. The name NLArts was devised for the non-profit because the website www.nlarts.com was available for purchase and we could not think of a better name to capture our mission.

At the beginning, NLArts workshops and the first summer camp in 2007 were hosted in various spaces in Fishtown, Kensington and Northern Liberties. In 2008, when the NLNA asked NLArts to be housed in the new Northern Liberties Community Center at the corner of N. 3rd St. and Fairmount Avenue, we knew that we had a more permanent home. The new location, with its proximity to the neighborhood recreation center and Kearney School, propelled NLArts into more collaborative programming to meet the needs of more kids and more families.

Over the last 18 years, NLArts has run 17 summer camps and hundreds of First Friday Workshops, days-off camps and family events. Our programming has featured some of the wonderful and talented artists in Philadelphia and we remain committed to teaching and learning centered on creative problem solving, made accessible to all types of kids, as we connect families more deeply to their community.

We are proud and somewhat amazed that the initial money we had in the Charter School account is still in the bank and grateful for the constant support of families in and around Northern Liberties, Fishtown and Kensington (and those outside these neighborhoods as well).

Thank you to everyone who sees the value in NLArts!