In this video, Novien Yarber, Ph.D., walks us through the Prebys Foundation’s approach to community well-being and the origins of the Healing Through Arts & Nature Initiative, as well as the vision and outcomes of the Impact Learning Labs.
Check out the video and the blog below to learn more about why Healing Through Arts & Nature matters, what we’ve learned so far, and how the Impact Learning Labs shape Prebys’ learning and help develop a shared understanding of community impact.
Overview:
What does it mean for a foundation to learn — not just to know, but to be shaped by what it comes to understand?
Our work in the 2026 Healing Through Arts and Nature did not begin as the initiative seen today. It grew over time from our 2021 – 2025 grant cycles, when we were funding multiple parallel but separate efforts: Art Bridging Communities, Community of Belonging, Youth in Healthcare Workforce, Creative Youth Development, and Youth Mental and Behavioral Health.
We entered that period with a clear intention: to support programming that could respond to a range of community realities, including organizational sustainability, the needs and contributions of teaching artists, and an escalating youth mental health crisis.
So, we tested it. We invested across geographies, communities, and approaches.
And what we learned, in many ways, affirmed what we believed, but in other ways, it deepened our curiosity and pushed our thinking further.
Across the numerous partnerships, organizations working at the edges of youth mental health and social-emotional learning demonstrated that creative practice is not peripheral — it is central to the impact. Art was a vehicle for dialogue, for connection across difference, and for healing.
“Music experiences in our classes helped children process the many traumas associated with resettlement through non-linguistic expression.”
Another reflected on how music, poetry, and storytelling became powerful tools for connecting individuals across backgrounds. Participants shared that seeing diverse voices showcased helped broaden their understanding of different cultural perspectives.
Similarly, within the youth mental and behavioral health work, family and caregiver engagement proved critical to youth behavioral health outcomes. Connection — to peers, to community — consistently strengthened young people’s development. These were not peripheral findings; they changed how we understood what makes programs of these sorts effective.
At the same time, within the arts initiatives, organizations surfaced a parallel, and equally critical learning: mental health is not a secondary intervention. It is foundational. For instance, trauma-informed practices showed up in many arts-education programs. Staff were trained to recognize triggers, de-escalate conflict, and design programs that supported students both within the artistic process and beyond it.
“We brought in counselors to train staff on trauma-informed care. It changed how we approach discipline, trust, and even the layout of our space.”
As another grantee partner shared about their programmatic approach, “we trained youth leaders to facilitate healing circles where their peers could talk about stress, grief, and identity.”
Many programs leveraged the arts as a tool for healing, identity development, and storytelling — particularly for BIPOC, queer, immigrant, and system-involved youth. These initiatives valued the creative process as much as the final product, empowering young people to see themselves as culture-makers.
“One student said: ‘I didn’t know my story was art.’ That’s what this program made possible.”
Our evaluation efforts also surfaced insights we did not initially set out to measure. And perhaps most importantly, we learned that ongoing evaluation, and evaluation capacity, itself is not extra. It is essential to an organization’s ability for continuous learning, and ultimately, responsiveness.
That is why Healing Through Arts and Nature is paired with the Impact Learning Labs from the Nonprofit Institute, which provides evaluation capacity to help organizations build the tools and practices they need to evaluate their work over time.
Taken together, they did not seem like incidental outcomes; they felt like signals.
So, we began to ask: What would it look like to bring these lessons together? What would it mean to support community work that connects mental, physical, and social health with arts and nature — not as “extras,” but as essential building blocks for well-being? And how could Prebys continue learning alongside our partners while also supporting their ability to measure, reflect on, and understand their own impact in ways that are meaningful to them?
Looking ahead, we are not simply deepening one initiative. We are advancing a larger hypothesis with community partners: that healing through arts and nature, when paired with an intentional focus on health, can function as an effective preventative framework — not only a treatment response. We believe this work can strengthen systems, reduce long-term costs, and expand what care looks like in community.
To this point, we continue to lean into learning partnerships with organizations like the Nonprofit Institute, the Natural History Museum, Social Rx, and the many committed nonprofit organizations leading this work. Together, we will continue to test, learn, and build the case for care that is rooted in community, creativity, nature, and connection.
Reginald Green is a Navy Veteran, Advocate, Artist & Instructor at The Veteran's Art Project (VETART), a recipient of the Prebys Foundation's 2025 Healing Through the Arts & Nature grant and...
