At Tacoma Arts Live, creativity isn’t just about the stage—it’s about building connections, fostering creativity, and transforming lives. While you may know Tacoma Arts Live for their big events at the Tacoma Armory or Pantages Theater, their work goes far beyond the spotlight. The local nonprofit also manages a wide variety of high-impact community programs.

The LENS Project is one of those programs. Short for Learning Empathy, Negotiation, and Sense-of-Self, LENS is an after-school program in unincorporated Pierce County’s Bethel School District that uses the arts to teach critical life skills. Students explore creativity while learning how to communicate, collaborate, and grow.

One Pierce, Elevate Health’s social impact fun, provided Tacoma Arts Live with a bridge loan to provide critical funding at the beginning of the program to ensure teachers would be paid and all the supplies students needed were in hand from the start.

We recently visited a LENS class at Elk Plain School of Choice in Spanaway to see the impact firsthand.

One Pierce partners with Tacoma Arts Live to support an afterschool program in unincorporated Pierce County