Thea Foundation

Thea Kay Leopoulos was finishing up her junior year at North Little Rock High School — a year marked by dramatic improvement in her academic performance — when she was killed in a car accident on Memorial Day 2001. Later that year, her parents, Paul and Linda Leopoulos, created the Thea Foundation to share the key to Thea’s academic turnaround: arts education.

“Her artistic endeavors made all the difference in her life,” said Thea’s brother, Nick Leopoulos, who became executive director of the foundation in 2019.

For more than 18 years, the Thea Foundation has been on a mission to advocate for the importance of arts in the development of Arkansas youth.

From its beginning, the Thea Foundation has provided scholarships to high school seniors — 36 scholarships totaling nearly $100,000 last fiscal year and nearly 400 scholarships since 2002. The foundation has an endowment to fund the scholarships.

The Thea Foundation continually raises money for two other major programs: Arts Reconstruction and Thea’s Art Closet.

“Arts Reconstruction was a program generated out of seeing arts programs in schools either nonexistent, stagnated or eliminated,” Nick Leopoulos said. The Thea Foundation partners with the Windgate Center for Art + Design at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to provide professional development, including travel expenses and housing, during the summer and stipends to pay for the supplies necessary to implement the new skills in the classroom.

Almost 1,200 students benefited from Arts Reconstruction in the 2018-19 academic year. “This program is very much arts for art’s sake,” Leopoulos said, but it is a structured program with follow-up by the foundation.

Thea’s Art Closet makes grants to schools for specific arts projects — 145 grants to 88 schools totaling almost $120,000 in 2018-19. Participating teachers can now apply for funding for up to four projects per academic year, two per semester.

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