Kids donate to kids: Brothers give back to programs they used at Arts Center

The Arts Center recently saw the youngest donors in its history. Two brothers gave money they raised over the course of a year to benefit programs they have used.

Jonas Flann, 12, and Luca, Flann, 10, donated a combined $300 for the Arts After School program. Most of that will be used for supplies and snacks.

“It teaches you stuff you might not know if you never go there, like techniques of arts,” Luca said. “It’s more than just drawing.”

The two have been involved in Arts Center programing since about first grade.

“I was just floored,” said Taylor Barnes, director of the Arts Center. “It was really gratifying. We’re not like a college where you have alumni.”

The Arts After School program picks up students from their elementary schools, buses them to the Arts Center for a snack and craft, then buses them home.

“Kids who are creative and energetic, often home alone after school, who really need a peer group that’s different than their peers in school,” Barnes said students in the program.

The Arts Center also has an artist in the schools working with different grade levels during the day.

Jonas also participated in the first day of a new middle school Arts After School program for theater.

“We just did scenes from different plays and acted them out and learned what theater is about,” he said.

Barnes said the new theater class teaches that there is more than acting to the art form. There’s also set costume, prop design and writing.

Last year Luca remembers working with then artist-in-residence William Hessian, known to students as “Mr. Billy,” when they created videos with puppets they made for display online.

Money the brothers earn around the house, or from odd jobs, is put into four categories: long-term savings, short-term savings, spending or sharing, said Nici Flann, Jonas and Luca’s mother. The money they donated was from the sharing fund.

“Sharing is looking at different groups that participate in their lives that they want to support,” Nici said.

Actively involved in the Arts Center herself, Nici, as in years past, let her sons decide where they wanted to donate. In years past the two have donated to the Buffalo Valley Chapter of the American Red Cross and to children in Belize.

“The Arts Center is kind of like another home for us,” she said. “When we talk about groups in our community that need our funding they’re one we’re pretty actively involved in.”

She said Arts After School has provided her sons with experiences they wouldn’t get anywhere else.

“What it does for kids developmentally, emotionally, being able to create a work of art and not judging it, it really access parts of the brain we don’t use when we emphasis math and reading as we do in elementary schools,” Nici said. “In many ways they learn more and do more with the arts curriculum.”

Sun reporter Ben Rodgers can be reached at 701-952-8455 or by email at brodgers@jamestownsun.com