Mobile Pottery Studio for TK-8 Students

K-12 STEAM education

Long Beach

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Ceramics belongs in early STEAM education. It fosters fine motor skills, creativity, and social-emotional learning while engaging aspects of engineering, physics, chemistry, and geology. Unfortunately, ceramics is missing from all 70 TK–8 public schools in Long Beach, where nearly 2/3 of students are socio-economically disadvantaged, English-learners, or homeless or foster youth. Diversity in art forms is important: “It is not sufficient for a school to offer only one or two types of [art] classes,” as each medium inspires and activates different abilities (American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2021). Children today are often starved of in-person, tactile experiences, rising numbers are chronically absent, and public school enrollment is declining. At this moment, schools need partners to bring ceramics into classrooms, ensuring all TK–8 students have equitable access to this hands-on, therapeutic medium that adds engagement to the school day.

This grant will support Clay Day LBC’s Mobile Pottery Studio: the only program in Long Beach bringing high-quality, in-school ceramics education to underserved TK–8 students. This program eliminates access barriers while creating a scalable model that addresses the need for consistent, media-rich, equitable arts education across LA County.
Throughout the school year, we partner with teachers to align our hands-on clay lessons with their curricula, delivering materials and instruction directly to students. Each Clay Day project involves two 60–90-minute visits: the first guides students in creating a sculpture or piece of pottery; the second teaches glazing techniques. We then transport, kiln-fire, and return the finished work.
In 2024, we were honored to receive support from Snap Foundation via LA2050, which has been instrumental in our ability to nearly double our output over the course of this year. From 2,112 students in 2024, we are on track to reach 4,000 in 2025, at 30 schools. In order to reach those numbers, we will pilot a residency program that targets Long Beach schools in the lowest 25% according to the California Healthy Places Index. During each month-long residency, we will work at a single school site, providing lessons to entire student populations in need of art programming.
We also collaborate with partners such as Century Villages at Cabrillo, 5-Eleven Hoops, and LBC Hero Squad to serve unhoused, Indigenous, autistic and /or neurodivergent youth.

Our vision is for every TK–8 student in LBUSD to have access to free, high-quality ceramics education. In 2026, we aim to (1) increase our current reach by 150%, to 6,000 students, and (2) pilot a new model alternating month-long residencies at Long Beach’s most disenfranchised schools with our open scheduling. To make this growth possible, we plan to rent warehouse space that expands our capacity for storing kiln-fired work and hire a dedicated part-time teaching artist from Long Beach’s ceramics community. A grant from LA2050 would help us meet demand from our growing waitlist of teachers, deepen our local impact, and build a foundation for further scaling. Our goal is to give every Long Beach child the opportunity to develop resilience, confidence, creativity, and engineering skills through ceramics. Clay Day LBC intends to raise curious, imaginative, empathetic, and resilient Angelenos who see creative expression as an integral part of their identity.