What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger, is the adage.After weathering crippling financial problems the Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation (KAF) charity is still open for business, but is now leaner and more focused.Today KAF will hold its first open house at the facility on Jubilee Road, in Devonshire, representing a major triumph for the organisation, because last Christmas it was in danger of closing its doors forever. Luckily, a desperate appeal to their supporters, netted several kind, mostly anonymous, donations.“Kaleidoscope is safe for another year, yes,” said founder and director Fiona Rodriguez-Roberts. “Are we out of the woods, no. But we are going to be here for the long haul. My staff has been so phenomenal with how they have all banded together. So many people came out last Christmas and helped us.”In January, KAF made a last ditch plea for money. Mrs Rodriguez-Roberts partly credits an article printed in The Royal Gazette with saving KAF from the axe.“That’s the reason why we are still open, due to the response we got from the article,” she said. “There were small and medium size donations that we received, but they added up. Most of them were anonymous and it gave us time to come up with solutions, which we were able to implement.”The solutions weren’t pretty. KAF, which opened in 2006, had to cut all the frills from its programme. The upper floor was rented out to a business, and KAF moved downstairs. They cut their gallery and studios. What is left is a programme that is strictly about art education. Ironically, such art programmes are becoming more and more needed in the community, since art programmes in schools and other facilities are usually the first thing to go in budget cutting exercises.“In this world, the visual is so important,” said Mrs Rodriguez-Roberts. “A doctor has to be able to think visually and think outside of the box. So does a carpenter. So does a teacher. Giving them visual arts gives them a different language to apply to maths and science. In a time like this with so many things being cut, and our community not as strong as it was, it is really important that children have somewhere to go where they can express themselves, and feel valued. For a lot of children, that somewhere is art.”KAF offers summer camps and art classes for children and adults and currently has around 200 students. Registration for some of their programmes was low this term, so they re-evaluated their prices to make them more family friendly. For example, a ten week class for four-years-olds costs $180 for members of KAF and $198 for non-members.“We are different from other art programmes because we are purely an education programme,” she said. “In our classes, we are really diving into the what and the who and the technical side of things. We are 100 percent hands on. Our classrooms are also designed to be covered in paint. We have more space than most other facilities so we are able to offer things like sculpture. We use more unusual materials such as clay, glass beads, mosaic tiles and wire.”KAF also takes part in the Art and Me programme in cooperation with the Masterworks Foundation and the Bermuda National Gallery. In this programme school students go to these three art museums for regular art classes.“Many government schools have art teachers, but they have to be shared with other schools,” said Mrs Rodriguez-Roberts. “If an art class is 45 minutes long in a school setting, fifteen minutes of that has to be spent cleaning up. So basically students have to stop just as they are getting into it. Through Art and Me they are getting 30 extra classes a year.”After the programme piloted last year, it was decided to tweak it a bit. Now each of the key players has dedicated students. Last year students rotated through the three, causing endless confusion as to where they were supposed to be and when. Now KAF will be working with Gilbert Institute students from primary four and five for the next two years.“We wanted more contact with the children to see if what we were doing was having an impact,” she said.Mrs Rodriguez-Roberts spoke to The Royal Gazette sitting with legs crossed on a light blue carpet in her office on the ground floor of KAF. This is KAF’s version of a board room.“I hope you don’t mind Bohemian style,” she said. “We tend to hold all our meetings this way. My employees seem to like it.”Alongside the room was a short wooden fence, designed to contain her 14-month-old daughter Poppy, who comes to work with her everyday. Poppy is no small miracle in herself, as Mrs Rodrigues and her husband Johnny tried for six years to have a baby.“I always said that when we had a child, we would do attachment parenting,” said Mrs Rodrigues. “Now, Poppy walks around like she owns the place. She sneaks into our class for 18-month olds. At home I have art supplies available for her, but not necessarily in reach because of her age. She has her own sketchbook. Her markers are her favourite things right now. We put out different things like oatmeal, rice and pasta for her to do art with. When she works with these materials, we have to sit with her because she will pop them in her mouth.”She denied that it was stressful trying to run KAF and watch the baby at the same time. She said often, if she had an important business call or some other matter to deal with, another member of staff would step in and help her with Poppy.“She is a big part of why I started this in the first place,” said Mrs Rodriguez-Roberts. “I wanted to create a place where children and families felt comfortable making art.”The open house will be held today at KAF from 5.30pm to 7.30pm at 27 Jubilee Road in Devonshire. It is a great opportunity to see the programme and also to sign up for classes and upcoming camps planned for half-term and Easter for students, four-years-old and up.