COACHART ORG

Our program improves the social and emotional wellness of children impacted by chronic illness. Our students are at high risk of life threatening outcomes from COVID-19 so they and their families must practice extremely stringent precautions. Their conditions have always isolated them from school and their peers, but now they are further limited. Their siblings are resentful of these limitations, and their parents are forced to make difficult choices. They are lonely, afraid, sad and angry, putting them at higher risk for depression and anxiety disorders. Our data show that after participating in a CoachArt activity, 93% of CoachArt students feel more relaxed; 95% feel more confident about themselves; 93% report making at least one new friend or mentor; and 95% of their caregivers feel supported in helping their child and would recommend CoachArt to others.

CoachArt provides free arts and athletics to kids impacted by chronic illness. While a COVID-19 diagnosis itself would qualify a child for our program if they needed 3 months of care, traditionally the most common diagnoses of the children that we serve are cancer (26%), blood disorders (10%), severe asthma (10%), neuromuscular disorders (7%). These children’s fragile health conditions make them particularly vulnerable to pandemic conditions, and they have generally been taking particularly extreme precautions in terms of social distancing and quarantining. Subsequently, the social and emotional toll that this pandemic is taking on all of us is particularly harming this population as well.

That’s where we come in and why our contribution is so needed -- CoachArt’s programs are designed to directly positively influence the social and emotional wellbeing of children impacted by chronic illness. So in response to COVID-19, we have pivoted all of our free 1-on-1 and group CoachArt arts and athletics lessons that we were already offering into virtual lessons, added a brand-new type of programming called CoachArt tutorials that we stream live multiple times per week, and are expanding our services to 5 new cities that we previously haven’t served: Chicago, Dallas, Denver, New York City, and Portland.

CoachArt offers directing programming to students through three possible avenues: (1) 1:1 in-home instruction; (2) group instruction; (3) special one-day events; and (4) through program partner scholarships with other organizations that are able to provide adaptable, inclusive instruction to students with chronic illness.
We utilize multiple innovative technology platforms in order to keep track of our constituents (students, families, volunteer instructors, and donors) -- mainly Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, and our proprietary platform CoachArt Connect.
CoachArt Connect enables volunteers to register, complete a background check, complete training, search for students based on skills and availability, and directly match for lessons. This online tool also tracks and monitors volunteer registration, confirmation, and attendance. CoachArt Connect has reduced the staff time to match volunteers with CoachArt youth from over 7 hours to under 17 minutes!
We have a passionate staff, board, partnerships with medical health professionals, and volunteer instructor network which combines innovative technological strategy with heart and care to our population of kids.

Our organization provides over 3,500 hours of instruction monthly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. Our vision is that one day every family impacted by chronic illness nationwide will have an opportunity to learn and grow together. We are a unique adaptive program that tends to the needs of our families.

We have already been actively responding to the COVID-19 crisis, having hired four different freelancers for four different projects since March 1st, including: a video project to give updates to our community about our response, a design project to create a powerpoint deck to present our plan to our Board of Directors, a PR plan to speak at virtual nonprofit conferences about how other nonprofits can rise to meet this moment (our first appearance is next week!), and a LinkedIn content plan to connect with local professionals in our 5 new cities to scale these free programs to their communities.

We’ve spent nearly our entire annual freelancer budget (that we spend entirely through Upwork) in the last 2 months to try to frontload the launch of our CoachArt Virtual Summer campaign. The two biggest contracts have been:

Melissa Burch’s thought-leadership contract, currently set for 1 month, to message our work broadly to the healthcare, nonprofit, technology, and other communities

Kim Stone’s social media manager contract, currently set for 1 month, to create LinkedIn content that specifically connects with and informs targeted individuals in our expansion cities about bringing CoachArt’s free programs to kids impacted by chronic illness in their community