About Us
Our Mission:
To provide educational and personal growth opportunities through the arts for inmates, volunteers and community to motivate and inspire positive change.
Our Guiding Principles:
- We believe that it is possible for inmates to change their lives.
- We believe that most inmates need role models, new skills, new attitudes, and an inclusive, non-judgmental atmosphere in order to change.
- We believe that powerful experiences through various art forms can help inmates transform their thinking and aspirations.
- We believe that involving trained community volunteers with inmates during art classes and programs provides effective mentoring that helps inmates shape their behavior patterns.
- We believe that arts programs can be transforming experiences for inmates, volunteers and community.
Elvera Voth organized the East Hill Singers, a men’s chorus of inmates from Lansing Correctional Facility and volunteer singers from the Kansas City area, in 1995. They gave their first performance outside the walls in 1996 at Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, KS.
The chorus revealed undeveloped talents in the prison population and the need for arts programming to tap into these latent gifts as an empowering and creative tool for rehabilitation. In 1998 maestro Robert Shaw traveled to Newton, KS to conduct a sing-along concert to benefit Voth’s fledgling organization. That year, Arts in Prison was incorporated as a not-for-profit, tax exempt, 501(c)3 organization.
Since then Arts in Prison has offered programming in music, writing, gardening, yoga, visual and performing arts in all units at Lansing Correctional Facility as well as at the Topeka Correctional Facility, The United Sates Penitentiary at Leavenworth, and juvenile detention centers in the area.
Arts in Prison is funded by private donations, corporations and grants. Arts in Prison is currently funded by donations and grants from the Arts KC Fund, the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City, the Francis Family Foundation, the Kansas Humanities Council and Storage Mart.
