(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Jackqui Tricarico, Senior Correspondent for "One-on-One".

And joining us now is Carol Losos who is the executive director of an incredible nonprofit located in Newark called GlassRoots.

It's so great to have you with us, Carol.

- Thank you, Jacqui.

I'm so excited to be here.

- Well, first, just describe GlassRoots for us.

And the organization was started 25 years ago?

- We are really excited to be celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, started in 2001 with the dream of marrying teaching Newark youth, glass art skills and business skills along with life skills.

And 25 years later, we're still here.

We started with a little afterschool club at the Boys and Girls Club with two torches.

And today we have large furnaces, a full scale glass arts studio, and serve 6,000 young people a year.

- Wow, and when we're talking about the people that you're serving, I know that it's a wide range of ages, eight to all the way up to 80, but let's start with that the younger population that you serve, those young kids, because we know that arts in general is just so good for our youth in just understanding themselves and the world around them.

But talk specifically about glass making and how you've seen that putting that together and creating glass in the way that you're teaching them really impact the young people coming through your doors.

- Sure.

There's something really wonderful about glass.

Totally agree with you, arts makes such a difference in everyone's lives and young people and can teach so many skills far beyond the art skill that they're learning.

Here's the magic, as I like to call it, the magic of fire and glass.

We hand fire to tweens and teens and young adults and we say "yes" and "create".

This is not your normal circumstances.

This is not your normal art class.

This is something different, unusual, risky, exciting, thrilling, all of the above.

And through it, young people learn teamwork, they learn resilience, they learn problem solving, they learn creativity, and they learn, yes, yes, I can do this.

And it's really this just tremendous mix of adding fire to it.

Think what we all know also in today's world, we all know glass breaks, right?

I drop a drinking glass to my kitchen floor, it's going to shatter.

So it's something we all understand.

And so one of the really powerful things we teach, I don't want to call it failure, we teach resilience.

We teach young people that after something breaks, you go back, you try again, you figure out what was wrong.

And they innately understand that they see their teachers doing it.

And it's just a really powerful tool that teaching glass allows us to share with our young people.

- I imagine teaching vulnerability too sounds like a big part of it.

- It does.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And when you said the safety or the risk factor, I imagine for me, if I came into your studio, I would be probably a little intimidated and I'm, you know, an older person.

Be intimidated by the machinery and the heat and the glass.

I think I would be intimidated.

Are people coming in initially intimidated and how do you work with them to get them over that like initial fear of touching the equipment and working with the equipment?

- Sure.

Of course you're intimidated.

And, you really should be, right?

Because we're talking about standing in front of a furnace that is set to 2,000 degrees of heat.

That's the temperature at which glass exists in a molten state.

We are naturally intimidated and that's not, the 10-year-old is intimidated, the 80-year-old is intimidated and everybody in between.

So first, what we do is we acknowledge that straight up with everyone.

Yes, you're going to be afraid.

And secondly, you can do it.

We're by your side and we are going to safely instruct you and show you how you can gather the glass and not burn your hands, how you can shape it and not burn your arms.

We're just going to just guide you and be with you along the way.

And fairly quickly really almost everyone gets over that fear.

That’s just so empowering For everybody and so very important for our young people.

- And they might come in and be a little nervous about the safety or getting hurt, but at the end of the day, what you're doing located in an urban community, you're creating a safe and supportive environment for these young people.

How are you making sure that's something that they feel at when they walk through the doors there?

- Sure, and that's something that our young people have said for years.

If we, you know, run our surveys, we talk with them afterwards and they describe what was it about GlassRoots that really made it such an important place?

And they say it was a safe place.

And that's through our staff.

I'm just gonna have to say that we employ an amazing group of artists who all have the title teaching artists 'cause that's the core of what we do.

And it's by being beside them, acknowledging that this is scary, acknowledging that this is difficult.

Listening is of course really big.

And I think it's also because it is a little bit risky and it's new to everybody that people, your colleagues don't come in with the expertise so that it's this understanding you can be vulnerable and everybody kind of starts at the same place that allows young people to become comfortable.

All of that's true.

I guess I'm gonna repeat.

At the end of the day, it's the staff here that create a sense of a safe place for our young people from Newark.

- Yeah, that's amazing.

And in terms of the space, there is a new space opening.

Tell us about that and the move that's happening.

- Sure.

It has been... So we've been in downtown Newark for 25 years.

And it's been a dream of GlassRoots for the past 10 to move to a bigger space so that we could reach more people with more programs, more opportunities, and more in-depth programs as well.

It's taken us a little while to get there to find the space, to raise the funds and all of the above, but we're just about to move into a space that's twice our size.

So we're going from 5,000 to 10,000 square feet.

It is being entirely built out for GlassRoots.

So every space has in mind a glassblowing studio, a flame shop, a place where you can make mosaics and stained glass.

It's all designed for us.

We're really excited.

It's on one floor on ground level with these big windows.

So as you walk by us still in downtown Newark you can just peer in the windows and watch glass being blown from the sidewalk.

- See the magic happening in real time.

- That's incredible.

And finally, real quick we know nonprofits, the way that we continue to operate and especially after 25 years, is through the support of the business community, other nonprofits.

How important has that support been in Newark for you and the organization?

- Oh, vital, that is we're a nonprofit and while we have programs we do earn money.

We have classes.

By the way, Jacqui, if Glassblowing was on your bucket list, we have a class for you.

- I'm adding it.

I'm adding it.

- All right.

Please do.

Come for date night if you'd like as well.

- Perfect.

- Bring anybody along with you.

So we do have a lot of programs where we earn money, but more than half of our income comes from fundraising.

And we are really dependent on our state's arts organization.

We're dependent on the city of Newark and the generosity through city funds and through really our corporations in Newark that make such a vital difference to the lives of nonprofits.

We are really excited that Horizon has been a supporter for a long time and has helped us build a new program that's just two years old called Prism, which is a program for LGBTQ teens and young adults.

And that's new to our offerings.

Thanks to Horizon, Prudential, we can go down the list and also our local nonprofits like the Victoria Foundation as well.

- That's incredible, and I cannot wait to come down and check out your new location on Bleeker Street later this summer.

Thank you so much, Carol, for joining us and giving us more insight about this incredible organization, thank you.

- Thank you, Jacqui.

- For Steve Adubato and myself, thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

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