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In 2015, Eric Booth was given the nation’s highest award in arts education and was named one of the 25 most influential people in the arts in the United States. He began as a Broadway actor and became a businessman, with his company becoming the largest of its kind in the country. He is the author of eight books, including the bestseller The Everyday Work of Art, The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible, and Making Change—Teaching Artists and Their Role in Shaping a Better World. He has been on the faculty of The Juilliard School, Tanglewood, The Kennedy Center, and at Lincoln Center Education.

He serves as a consultant for many arts organizations, including seven of the ten largest professional symphony orchestras in the country as well as for cities, states, and businesses around the U.S. and in 11 other countries. A frequent keynote speaker, he co-founded the International Teaching Artist Collaborative and the publication The Ensemble for the global music for social change movement. He is the owner of Everyday Arts Inc. and his website is ericbooth.net.

I regularly read Eric’s posts on LinkedIn. With his permission, I am offering his post of April 18, 2025.

“You’ve heard me sing the praises of ArtistYear. You’ve heard of Teach for America and City Year. You might have heard of Foster Grandparents who mentor children and Senior Companions. Does VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) sound familiar? All are part of AmeriCorps. A hard-working national staff of 500 guided all these and other programs—85% of whom were placed on administrative leave today. We must stay aware of and make visible the ravages of this government’s reckless hatchet work. Pass this news along.”

I’d like to share that I worked for VISTA in my hometown of Philadelphia during the summer of 1966 before my freshman year at the University of Louisville School of Music. The neighborhood in which I worked for VISTA was a challenging one. If you saw Sylvester Stallone (who by the way attended my high school) in the original Rocky movie, you’ve seen exactly where I worked. Rocky was filmed in Kensington—in those days, an economically-distressed neighborhood of Philadelphia with two main population groups: the descendants of Irish mill workers whose jobs disappeared when their work was gradually offshored to other countries, and the descendants of African Americans who had lived in Philadelphia for at least two hundred years by 1966.

As good old—I mean good new—Google AI says: “The VISTA program (Volunteers in Service to America) was initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. It was established as part of his broader ‘War on Poverty’ initiative. VISTA was designed as a domestic version of the Peace Corps and aimed to address poverty in the United States by deploying volunteers to work on community projects.” And volunteers we were! VISTA reimbursed us for transportation, and that was it. But that was fine with us. I and several of my friends at Abraham Lincoln High School—situated about 40 minutes by public transportation from Kensington near the Northeastern Philadelphia communities of Mayfair and Holmesburg—thought it would be important for us to volunteer before we all went off to college.

There was an element of racial tension in Kensington, but the grade-school children we worked with didn’t appear to be as concerned about race as they were about being hungry. Drug addiction and alcoholism were certainly in evidence in the neighborhood and, as a result, children were all too frequently neglected by their parents. Ostensibly our volunteer job was to help them improve their verbal and math skills because they were failing in the parochial and public schools they attended. What we quickly realized was that the most important thing we had to do was to feed them some nourishing food—provided by VISTA—and just as importantly, get them into the swimming pool once a day. It was emotionally very draining but fulfilling work. Somedays you just had to cry when you got home.

But we believed we were doing something good for others. We could tell by the way the kids were waiting for us every morning when we got off the “El” at the Lehigh Avenue stop on the Frankford/Market Street subway-elevated line. They would rush us and collect as many hugs as they could as we walked together to the recreation center. We felt proud to be part of VISTA.