An Arts Group Shares Its Struggle and Gets a Second Chance

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation gave Streb, a nonprofit dance company and community center in Brooklyn, N.Y., a $25,000 cash grant plus a year of management assistance valued at more than $100,000 to create Teen Action Club, a program to provide arts and physical education to teenagers.

What happened: The organization wanted to attract 120 teenagers up to age 18, but only about half that number joined. Streb says it didn’t market the idea enough but also that it priced tickets too high, among other problems.

How it responded to weaknesses: The group decreased ticket prices and focused exclusively on young teenagers. But it still didn’t have enough resources to make the program work as well as it had hoped.

Results: In 2010, EmcArts, which collaborated with Duke on the grant program, published a report about Streb’s youth program, including steps to put it in a better position to start innovative projects, such as better data-collection systems so it could see right away what was not working. The following year, Streb received another $25,000 from the foundation so it could see whether those changes made a difference. Today Teen Action Club is one of Streb’s most popular programs—so much so, says Kim Cullen, the club’s producing director, that the organization started a Tween Action Club for 10- to 12-year-olds.