On the move: Moving Arts Española says goodbye to current location

Moving Arts Española, an organization that provides affordable performing and visual arts education and free nutritional and academic support for children and youth, is having to move from the facility it has occupied for the past decade.

The organization must move by 2025. The nonprofit has partnered with Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and TSAY Corp. to use a former casino space. The move is necessitated by the pueblo’s desire to use the facility for other purposes.

“The almost 20,000 square feet of space has been made available to children from a range of 80 miles,” Moving Arts co-founder Roger Montoya said. “Children are coming from Chama, Taos and Santa Fe and Los Alamos and Truchas, because nothing exists like this for many miles. We’re proud of that and it’s a unique product. I think it’s one that could be replicated in virtually any setting, urban or rural.”

Moving Arts Española’s programs promote the creative, physical, academic, social and emotional health and well-being of children and youths from the Española Valley and northern New Mexico, according to its website.

“We’re not leaving the valley,” Moving Arts co-founder Salvador Ruiz-Esquivel said. “We’re just changing location. We’ll remain within the area. It means new options ... We will be relocating, but it has a lot to do with the growth that we have been able to accomplish in over 16 years.”

Montoya, who is a former state legislator and was named one of CNN’s heroes in 2019, said the hope is to move into a transitional home at Northern New Mexico College. He said he and Ruiz-Esquivel would be meeting with the college’s president soon to see if there’s an interim space.

“When we look at the statistics of New Mexico from educational attainment and childhood well-being, we just placed 50 again on the bottom of the national list in those two categories,” Montoya said. “It is so critical that programs like Moving Arts that provide that really powerful mentorship and opportunity for development, youth development, that they continue to thrive, particularly in rural areas and tribal communities, where we’re seeing a deficit.”

Montoya said the increase of fentanyl addiction and the increase in the unhoused population has created a true need for Moving Arts and its services.

“We need to do the prevention work and that’s primarily what our key focus is, providing a holistic space for belonging, creativity and powerful development for families in northern New Mexico,” Montoya said. “Over 60% of the high school graduates are raised by grandparents or great grandparents, due to incarceration, homelessness, addiction and even death. There’s a real, critical need for that wraparound services model, which we do provide here — social, emotional, physical, spiritual, the meal — the sense of a container that is indeed safe and a place for children to learn and grow into powerful contributors, contributors to the future.”

Ruiz-Esquivel said the meal program at Moving Arts began about seven years ago to feed children who were unable to eat prior to coming to the facility.

“Our program starts at 4 o’clock and the kids are coming directly from the school,” Ruiz-Esquivel said. “They have not the opportunity to go home and have a meal. They were hungry. They were not paying attention. They were drinking a lot of water. And so we started with the small snacks, oranges, apples, cheese to give the kids something to hold them on.”

He said one thing led to another, and they were able to partner with Health New Mexico, now known as Chicanos Por La Causa, where Moving Arts could get a percentage reimbursement for its meal program. Meals are vegetarian-based and are available to children and their families.

“It’s a farm-to-table, locally sourced program that includes an internship program for high school students to learn to do peer education in the public schools around nutrition and menu design, as well as the rudimentary skills of prep and service,” Montoya said. “We’ve served over 110,000 meals, hot meals over the last seven years that are reimbursed by the USDA reimbursement mechanism.”

The program works with about 300 children each week. Children have different choices of activities during the school year.

Montoya said Moving Arts recently began instructing and providing mentorship and career training for 14- to 25-year-olds.