Positive News · 7 hours ago

How Student Art Is Helping Fund Change

Through a program called Students Rebuild, more than 114,000 young people have turned drawings, quilts, dances, and films into a million dollars of funding for organizations working on connection and belonging across the world. The mechanism is elegant in its faith: a child makes something, submits it, and watches a dashboard confirm that their participation moved real money toward real need. "Do young people think they can make a difference in the world?" asks Sarah Fanslau, Creative Visions' director of programme impact and evaluation - and the programme is designed so the answer arrives not as an abstraction, but as evidence. At a time when arts education is being cut from schools and young people are often told their voices matter while being given nowhere to put them, Students Rebuild quietly insists otherwise. What it offers is not just funding for refugees or displaced youth in Greece and Ukraine, but something harder to measure: the early conviction that imagination is a form of agency.