Create Your Opportunity (CYO)
Turn your creative passion into opportunity by advancing your artistic skills, mentoring young artists, and connecting with your community!
CYO provides middle school and high school youth with tools to develop and use their creative voices to connect with their community.
Mentorship and Arts Education
Follow Your Art offers volunteer and paid opportunities and training to be a 1:1 mentor or an assistant in our arts programs. With enough training and motivation, these opportunities can expand to teaching your own programs for children.
Teens learn skills that they will take beyond the Big Yellow House, including:
- building leadership skills through mentoring children in the arts
- designing creative projects for various ages and abilities,
- learning how to organize and run a group
- building communication skills by connecting with caregivers and community members, and
- navigating challenges along the way with the support of dedicated FYACS staff and mentors.
Community Engagement
Use your creative skills to engage in the wider community, either through programs and collaborations coordinated by FYACS staff, or through self-directed creative opportunities.
Follow Your Art provides a safe space and structure for teens to take an idea from conception to execution, with support and mentorship from experienced FYACS staff and community creatives. Activities may include:
- learning how to design, fund, lead, and implement a community art project
- receiving paid art commissions
- making connections with the community to bring awareness to a social justice issue you are passionate about
- earning community service hours, realize your Capstone or service project with support from our mentoring staff, and
- making meaningful art in your community!
Create Your Opportunity Examples
Mouse over the images below to see some of the ways teens have engaged through the CYO program at FYACS to date. Have other ideas? Fill out the CYO interest form and we’ll reach out!
For Community Partners
Click here to learn how to commission a young local artist from the Create Your Opportunity Program to create personalized artwork to commemorate milestones, anniversaries, retirements, and more!
More About Youth Employment at FYACS
Follow Your Art has provided training, internships, and employment for high school youth for several years. Beginning in 2021, we began to work more intentionally to provide meaningful training and “mentorship trees” for high school interns, to learn skills beyond washing paint brushes.
Our current program provides high school youth the opportunity to to be trained during internships that provide a stipend, and be mentored by staff and more seasoned studio assistants to learn how to plan and present a creative activity for children, engage positively with kids of all abilities, and effectively and professionally communicate with caregivers. A summer program engaging middle school students interested in arts education, called “In the Middle”, was piloted in 2024.
Create Your Opportunity is made possible by YouthReach, a grant awarded by Mass Cultural Council for Creative Youth Development programs.
