Community Outreach Offerings from The MAC
• The Art Bus
• Free After-School Art
• The MAC Thrifter
• Free Little Craft Cabinet
• Fostering Friends
• Scholarships
• Teachers teaching Teachers
Free Little Craft Cabinet
We have a plethora of craft and art materials that we want to share! Mr. Robert Lovsey Jr built us a super cool craft cabinet to sit outside our front door. This cabinet is open for anyone to take whatever they’d like in the cabinet. Friends can also put craft/art materials in the cabinet when we are not at the shop to receive donations!
We received a huge lot of stained glass from a super generous individual. She told us stories of how her and her husband had made stained glass since 1989. Her husband passed and she wanted to share her collection with an org that she knew could use the stash. We are gathering some volunteers to cut and grind glass, and we are working towards finding some funding to offer art educators stained glass packs. These packs would include all the materials and equipment they would need to complete a class of stained glass. We will also offer free instruction to the educators to make sure they are prepared to share this skill with their students.
If you are an art educator and would like to participate in this program- please fill out the form below!
If you are interested in helping us fund this program. Please click the donate button now.
Thank you!!
If you are a teacher and want to take a class to learn stained glass please sign up HERE.
We will be working with the Overnight Warming Centers Alton non profit to provide art materials to those that frequent the center. We are looking for donations of gently used sketchbooks, drawing pencils, drawing pens, and basic art instructional books. Containers to contain those materials would also be helpful. Please bring or send materials to 115 E Main Street Staunton IL 62088. Need more info? Email us (office@macart.org)
Our mission is to get art to our community. To further look into that mission, we hope to get art to kiddos, and a step down deeper, to kiddos that NEED to have art to help them through a tough time in their life.
Recently we started a new project. Fostering Friends.
This mission will be to get age appropriate art materials to every kiddo entering into the foster system in Macoupin County.
Can you help? ((Click here))
DYI Art Bags
One of our fabulous volunteers (Ms. Sarah Walker) has created a pattern for an art bag. This bag will be used for kiddos (ages 1 year old to 2nd grade). We need 30 of these bags. It takes approximately 3 pieces of felt. We have felt at the shop (115 E Main Street Staunton) that you have free access to if you’d like to sew us up one of these art bags!
Update: 09/03/2020
We have had 12 bags donated thus far! We are hopeful that we will get 30 of these bags by a November 1st deadline. Thank you all so very much for your help with this program!
We help the community whenever we can!
In the midst of the pandemic, our local library reached out to us in hopes that we could find a woodworker that could build them a Little Free Library.
We did indeed find that wood worker! Mr. Layne Cloud had the library built in just a few days! Then we spent time painting the library and making sure it was just right!
As of June 2020, the Little Free Library lives behind the Staunton Public Library.
We had been dreaming of this Free Little Craft Cabinet before the pandemic hit, but that was just our gas for the fire! This cabinet will always have paper, glue and other materials for free every day of the week, every week of the year~
Our wonderful volunteer, Robert Lovsey Jr. was laid off from his job and was able to spend three whole days at The MAC (before shelter in place) to create this magnificent cabinet.
Since its creation this cabinet has handed out almost 800 free craft kits to kiddos in our community.
Starting March 17th, 2020 we decided that even though kiddos couldn’t go to school to learn, we would make sure they still got to learn art! We made up kits of art materials for school age kiddos. We made some video instructions. That first week we handed out over 100 craft kits to our community!
Since our first week we have given out over 800 kits to kiddos. Released each Tuesday, each kit includes all the materials kiddos need to create a project. We then release a live video the next day helping kiddos to use the materials to create!