Draw Change Brings Hope to Inner City Youth in Atlanta

For children growing up in low-income households, the path to believing in your own potential can be a long one. Jenny Lobato built an organization around shortening that distance.

Lobato immigrated to the United States from Uruguay in the late 1970s and grew up as a first-generation American with a deep connection to art. That connection, she says, shaped who she became. In 2009, she founded Draw Change, a nonprofit that delivers arts programming to children from underserved communities through after-school programs and summer camps.

The name is intentional. Draw Change is a play on words—drawing the change you want to see in your life, and drawing, or bringing, change into it. For Lobato, the concept is personal. After college, she weighed a career in corporate America before choosing a different path, one that combined her love of art with a commitment to the children who reminded her of herself.

The organization works with kids on varying timelines—sometimes a single day, sometimes an entire school year. Lobato says the longer engagements are where the most visible shifts happen: a growing sense of empowerment, a loosening of the belief that circumstance is destiny. She put it plainly: they are not victims of their circumstances, and the organization works to make sure they know it.

Families who have participated in Draw Change programs describe the impact in concrete terms. Mary Kate Williams, whose granddaughter has attended the camp over multiple years, said the experience planted something lasting—seeds, she said, that will go on long after the camp ends.

Like most nonprofits, Draw Change operates against a steady current of challenges. But for Lobato, the measure of the work is visible in the people it reaches—children, parents, caretakers, volunteers, and staff. That breadth of impact, she says, is what keeps her going.