Find & Seek was awarded a free 6 month Incubator Membership at the wonderful new Made in NY Media Center located in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We'll be there until October! Here is our winning application:

What Is Your Story? Tell Us About Your Project. What Are Your Goals & Challenges?

"Find & Seek is working to transform the experience of growing up for the youngest at risk children in Red Hook, and wants to tell the story. Find & Seek is a project-based early childhood lab program that focuses on materials exploration, artistic creation, play and storytelling. Our approach is child-centered in that we draw our curriculum directly out of the interests of the children we work with, who range in age from 1 to 6. We work with infants and their mothers, toddlers and young children who are not in preschool, and kindergarten and first grade students in after school programs. We curate and present a beautiful array of natural objects and recycled materials, facilitate as children give form to what they imagine, and encourage them to tell their stories in their own words. We thoughtfully source raw materials from the Earth and recycling bins, and we use these objects as tools to facilitate meaningful imaginative play. We listen to and shine a light on children’s stories, using educational tools such as dialogue, inquiry, creative process, collaboration and documentation.

Calley Bittel, Takiema Bunche Smith, Ella Williams and Jim Matison (of Brooklyn Kindergarten Society), BNS principal Anna Allanbrook, Sherry Cleary (Director, NYC Professional Development Institute) and Beth Ferholt (Associate Professor, Early Child… — Calley Bittel, Takiema Bunche Smith, Ella Williams and Jim Matison (of Brooklyn Kindergarten Society), BNS principal Anna Allanbrook, Sherry Cleary (Director, NYC Professional Development Institute) and Beth Ferholt (Associate Professor, Early Childhood, Brooklyn College) discuss plans for the Brooklyn New School Infant Toddler Center, in a conference room at the Made in NY Media Center.

We aim to build a system of care with partners like the Alex House Project (serving Red Hook’s teen mothers and their babies) and the Brooklyn New School (a progressive public school which is designing an Infant-Toddler Center), to provide a strong network for all young children in Red Hook, particularly those living below the poverty line. Find & Seek’s long-term goal is to develop a community space that can grow with Red Hook’s needs and function as a multi-purpose space with children at the center. We want to foster the center’s co-creation by young and old members, including parents and grandparents, along with teachers and community professionals. As we pilot our program, we will use video documentation to tell the story. We will invite the children and their families to take part in our research, building and discovery in a way that provides us the opportunity to “give back” to the community.

We have received a grant to do our work, are developing proposals to share with our local politicians, and are writing grant proposals for a range of funders. We have fiscal sponsorship under the aegis of World Education Endeavor."

Our desk at the Made in NY Media Center. Actually, we rarely use this desk. But we do use the conference rooms a lot!

So, what is Find & Seek doing at the Media Center? For the most part, we are utilizing the facility's beautiful conference rooms for meetings with colleagues about a wide range of projects we are developing. One of those projects is a class for families to be held on Saturdays in one of the Media Center's classrooms. We'll keep you posted on that . . .

Invisible Child (NYTimes) Photo essay projected onto wall at Made in NY Media Center. The projections in the space are ever-changing.

Elisha views the slideshow we are preparing for our presentation at the annual Face to Face conference for arts educators, which will be happening a few days later at City College.