Canyonite Encourages Creativity and Confidence at Rediscover Center
Em Kramer at Rediscover
By Laurel Busby
News & Information Editor
The transformative power of art is key to why Em Kramer keeps coming back to the Rediscover Center on Washington Blvd.
As a child growing up in the Canyon, Kramer attended the center’s first tinkering camp in around 2011. Co-founded by her father, Aaron, an artist who works with recycled materials, the camp provides children with training in the safe use of tools while also offering a massive selection of recycled supplies to create imaginative projects.
“Not only do I remember the feeling of joy I had in that space and the fun of getting to explore it, I loved being surrounded by kids getting to learn the skills I had been learning in my dad’s studio,” Kramer, 24, said. “I found community, and in pictures from the camp, I have such a rare smile on my face.”
Kramer had been a shy artsy kid, and her experiences at Rediscover helped her confidence grow. Now, as the after-school programs manager at Rediscover, which has programs more than 40 schools across Los Angeles County, Kramer gets to watch similar transformations in children, including youngsters who may be angry, asocial, and uncommunicative.
“I’ve seen kids who have gained a new level of confidence because they’re using tools, being trusted, and being encouraged to develop their creativity,” Kramer said. “My favorite story is this one kid who started out incredibly difficult to work with, with a hairpin trigger and a permanent scowl. Over the program’s eight weeks, his creativity bloomed, and he made these incredible pieces of art that connected to his life and told his own story. He left a different kid, someone excited, saying thank you, starting conversations, and having made friends. Watching him learn to smile was a personal joy.”
For Kramer, her path to working at Rediscover had some detours. When she was 11, her father, mother, Joan, and sister, Ana, temporarily moved with her to London. When the family returned in 2015, she was 15 and old enough to volunteer as a counselor in training at Rediscover, so she started work and eventually earned a job there as an assistant facilitator.
She simultaneously developed her art and tinkering skills outside of Rediscover by leading the robotics team at Windward School and later doing print making, collage, and photography as part of her studio art and anthropology major at Wellesley College, where she graduated in December 2023.
She then explored various artistic jobs, including working at the craft store Paper Source, making props for movies, and interning at a film production company. But in January, she came back to Rediscover.
“I like to think of my return to Rediscover as inevitable,” Kramer said.
At first, she was a facilitator who worked with children at schools and festivals. Then, after a month, she applied for and was promoted to her current position, which includes working with the facilitators, ensuring they have needed supplies, doing preparatory work, overseeing camps, and moving from school to school where the center operates after-school programs.
Em Kramer at her first Rediscover camp
The work is varied and involving. For the youngest pre-K students, there is the sensory play of exploring materials, such as bottle caps, and learning to reimagine those pieces as larger art objects. In elementary school, making cardboard art using cardboard scissors and hot glue is preeminent, while middle schoolers learn design principles, problem solving, creative techniques, and woodworking, including learning to use power tools.
“They get to feel like they really have the power in their own hands to create,” Kramer said.
The process is also more important than the outcome on the children’s growth, Kramer said. Their creative explorations provide a similar effect to art therapy. The children’s emotional growth flourishes as their artistic endeavors help them heal from troubles they may be encountering in other parts of their lives.
“It centers them,” Kramer said. “The act of creating art becomes a meditative space or a space to explore in a way they may not feel like they can otherwise. They don’t need to use their words like they do in the rest of their lives. There’s a subconscious part of themselves that they’re exploring, and their art expresses a tiny piece of themselves…. It really works.”
A fun perk of the job is that Kramer can stay after Rediscover closes to make her own projects, which may involve carving linoleum for print work or sewing her own clothes and costumes. However, the effect the center has had on herself and the children that she teaches is its most important asset for her.
“Art has had such a huge impact on my own confidence and how I’ve developed as a human being,” Kramer said. “That’s what brings me back. I am making an impact I can see with my own eyes…. I feel so passionate about what Rediscover does.”
If you’re interested in contacting Kramer about Rediscover’s programming, email her at em@rediscovercenter.org.
