The heart of the matter • Letter from our Director, Sherry Jason
Letter from our Past President, Liane Weintraub • History

The heart of the matter:
the mission of City Hearts

City Hearts: Kids Say 'Yes' To The Arts is committed to intervene in a loving, supportive and nurturing way to break the cycle of poverty, neglect, abuse, homelessness, delinquency and violence that destroys the lives of our children. Through the discipline and healing of classes, workshops and performing experiences in the Arts, City Hearts provides positive role models, enrichment and inspiration for our children to learn to be productive, creative, law-abiding members of society.

City Hearts is a non-profit organization which has offered free visual and performing arts classes to children in Los Angeles for over 19 years. Established in 1984 by criminal defense attorneys, Sherry and Bob Jason. City Hearts was founded on the belief that the Arts are the most powerful tools to communicate with and rehabilitate troubled youth at risk from gangs and drugs. City Hearts has come to be an integral part of the preventive and rehabilitative effort in Los Angeles, inner city, and serves as a model for youth diversion programs across the country.

The 2003 schedule serves 500 plus children per week, ages 5-18, with FREE after-school and weekend classes in Theater, Dance, Music, Photography, Circus Arts & Shakespeare.

Our Summer Camp of the Arts 2003 reaches 200 of our youngest students ages 5-10, starting these inner city children on the road to discovery and love of learning.

Letter from the City Hearts Founder/Director

WELCOME TO OUR WEBSITE!!! This is a very exciting accomplishment for City Hearts and I must first thank my friend and neighbor, Phyllis Persechini, for her incredible talent and generosity.

We introduce you to City Hearts in these new pages and we invite your participation and support as you learn our history, meet our faculty and students and hopefully share our goals to help our community's most impoverished and at-risk children fulfull their potential and their dreams.

City Hearts was a dream come true for me. In l977, as a new lawyer in the Public Defender's Office, I went on a tour of Central Juvenile Hall. In a small storeroom, I watched in sadness and fascination as a boy had his first piano lesson. He was a true prodigy, the music of Mozart touching his soul. I learned that this young genius was 13 years old, awaiting placement in the California Youth Authority (prison for kids) for committing a murder. I wondered what would have been this young man's case history if he had met the piano before he met guns and gangs. My frustration increased on a daily basis as I represented my young clients and met their victims. There had to be a way to prevent the crimes from being committed in the first place. There had to be a way to help these kids see a different path.

I have always loved teaching Ballet! In fact, I started teaching in my parents' garage when I was ll years old. So, to me, the Arts are the perfect way to teach self-esteem, instill values of discipline and creative effort and to provide a positive alternative to the insanity that children face.

My dream came true...in l983, my husband, Bob, and I found a space in an old warehouse. The building was actually the old Challenge Creamery building, built in l926. Our space was where the milk was loaded onto the trucks. So with the natural elevation change of the loading dock and the stunning concrete pillars every 23 feet, we created a proscenium theatre and dance studio ...5,000 square feet of oak floors and 50 feet of mirrors. We borrowed money from friends and family, took out loans and my husband used all his retirement funds to provide the raised and padded oak floor on which the children dance.

Our first classes were held in January, 1985 and we began with three classes for 60 children. Back then, I did all the typing myself on our old Brother typewriter (I still have it). I paid the teachers out of my own salary as a Public Defender and I taught one Ballet class a week.

In April, l985, the Los Angeles Times ran a feature story of City Hearts, and from that our first donations arrived. I received a call from an attorney. His wife wanted him to make a donation to City Hearts as her Mother's Day gift that year. She said she had been blessed with Ballet lessons as a child and nothing would make her happier as the Mom of a six year old than to be able to make sure less fortunate children had that joy of Ballet. Her husband later served as our first Board President. And those first City Hearts children are now teachers in elementary schools in the Los Angeles area.

Over the past 19 years, City Hearts has grown. More and more children need our services. As Arts programs are shamefully cut from school budgets, the needs and demands increase.

City Hearts now serves over 500 children per week in programs throughout Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. And we are now in our second year of the Expanding Horizons project with Dr. Kathy Larson in Oxnard. We have added Drama, Shakespeare, Photography, Music, Jewelry making, Circus Arts, Jazz and Singing to the platter of the Arts that we lovingly provide. The children of City Hearts are from the most impoverished and at-risk areas of our community.

Through the Arts, we can and do inspire them away from gangs, drugs, delinquency and a lifetime sentence on Skid Row.

Please stay in touch...we look forward to sharing more growth and success with you...

With warmest wishes,
Sherry Jason