Connecting Arts and Education to Help People Climb Out of Poverty

Valerie Chiang/The New York Times/Redux

At the Sugar Hill Museum Preschool in West Harlem, students learn in sun-drenched classrooms where artists frequently visit. In the courtyard beyond the classrooms, preschoolers set up easels to paint. Classes often migrate over to the galleries at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, housed in the same building as the preschool.

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“At 4 years old, they can use a paintbrush as well as they can use a pencil,” Ellen Baxter says.

While Baxter isn’t an artist or a teacher, she believes deeply in the power of creativity and education. “Activism is artistry, in part,” she wrote in an email. As the founder and executive director of Broadway Housing Communities, Baxter has long championed learning and the arts as essential components of the low-income housing her organization builds.

The New York City nonprofit built the preschool and museum as part of its 191,000-square-foot mixed-use development, the Sugar Hill Project. It was designed by renowned architect David Adjaye, who also served as lead designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The West Harlem neighborhood of Sugar Hill was once home to Thurgood Marshall, Duke Ellington, and other giants of the Harlem Renaissance. Today, however, more than 70 percent of the neighborhood’s children live in poverty. The Sugar Hill Project opened in 2015 and includes 124 affordable apartment units for people with very low incomes. Unlike most other housing projects in New York City, Sugar Hill is home to both families and single adults. Twenty percent of its residents are formerly homeless families.

But what really sets Sugar Hill apart is residents’ access to art and quality education.

“There’s a sense of dignity around this program, around this design of the neighborhood, the building,” says George Anastassiou, chairman of the board of the Mustakis Foundation, a Chilean family foundation that gave $100,000 to the Sugar Hill Project. “What you see after three or four years is the community, it’s engaged with a much higher expectation of what life can be.”

Baxter has been at this work a long time. She started Broadway Housing Communities 36 years ago to help permanently house homeless and low-income families and adults in West Harlem and Washington Heights. The nonprofit participated in Callahan v. Carey, the 1979 class-action lawsuit that established the right to shelter in New York State. While that case marked progress toward ending homelessness, Baxter remembers being appalled by the poor quality of the shelters, like the Fort Washington Armory in Washington Heights, that were hastily established in the wake of the lawsuit.

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“At that time, they put 1,400 homeless men in one room. It was like a refugee camp,” Baxter says. “They left the lights on all night because of the violence.”

Baxter was deeply affected by the conditions people lived in at the armory. She realized that while the court case was a victory, there was still a long way to go and that shelters weren’t the solution. She founded Broadway Housing Communities to “humanize that extreme social neglect that lands people on the street.”

Baxter had long been interested in the societal failures that led to people in need being forgotten. In college, she spent 10 days observing conditions on the psychiatric ward of the Augusta State Hospital in Maine, checking in under a pseudonym and a fabricated diagnosis of manic depression. After graduating from Bowdoin College, Baxter won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and spent a year living in Geel, Belgium, studying that town’s centuries-old tradition of taking in the mentally ill as boarders in their homes.

“When I came back, I had really been influenced by the values and the very practical way of caring for people who need extra help, without a lot of fancy regimens and diagnoses,” Baxter says. In Geel, those in need were fully integrated into the community, rather than segregated in an institution or shelter. She wanted to try to do that in New York City, too.

Baxter is willing to do whatever is necessary to advance her mission, says Jamie Bennett, executive director of ArtPlace America, which provided $350,000 in start-up funds for Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in 2012.

“I’ve seen her give a master class in the policy environment that leads to families being trapped in poverty for generations, and then I’ve seen her pick up a broom and sweep up something on the floor,” he says.

Baxter is particularly proud of opening the Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. She says it helped Broadway Housing Communities say, “The history of this community is important enough to develop a new cultural institution that is centered on its children.”

And she remains committed to the idea that for housing to be humane, it has to be more than four walls and a roof. “The arts and education are fundamental elements to make the housing community flourish.”