NUA Knights Theory of Change

While New Urban Arts has been around for years our program at Central High school just started this fall. Because we are a new program we face several problems; enrollment forms, resistance from faculty, attendance rates, funding, and a lack of community partners. I think right now we are really facing big problems with enrollment forms and attendance rates. Because we are working with high school youth often when a paper gets sent home it does not come back to us. Enrollment forms are what we need to be able to track how many students we have attending programs. But we were passing out enrollment forms to all our students and not getting them back. First we made spreadsheets by number of times attending programs, ex. 15-20, 20-25, and then by if they have or have not turned in their form. From there we started with the youth who have the highest program attendance and have not turned in forms, we bribed them with homemade brownies when they turned it in. But we still did not have all of them turned in. From there we assessed that maybe it wasn't the students but the guardians. SO we assessed our population and re-wrote the enrollment form is a few different languages in hopes that it would make guardians more likely to sign the forms. We are also going to create a more eye-catching paper to attach with the enrollment form that has a brief overview of what we do, and why we need the form in hopes of persuading guardians that way. With our theory of change in reassessing our methods of attaining enrollment forms we have been able to increase out enrollment numbers.