Albirda Rose’s dance program for underprivileged children has always given her plenty to worry about. She worries about the risks of running the program in neighborhoods known for being dangerous. She worries about watching some of the kids fall victim to various vices. And of course, money has been a constant source of anxiety.

As of this November, Rose has one less concern on her mind. Her program, the Village Dancers, has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, which doles out money with the intention of expanding the dancing opportunity for children who otherwise have limited exposure to the arts.

“We have been running this thing without any money,” said the SF State dance professor. “But the point was to offer dance to students who can’t pay large sums of money for lessons somewhere else. This grant is a great thing for us. It will sustain us for a year, allow us to do some publicity, and will provide overall support for the work we do.”

Rose, who has a doctorate in education and has been teaching at SF State for 36 years, started the program as a way to help students who had an interest in teaching to get some hands-on experience. She took them around to various schools all over the city, where they worked with mostly elementary-age students. Six years ago, she learned about the Visitacion Valley neighborhood and its reputation of violence, drugs and poverty. Rose decided she needed to take the program to the children who needed it most – those who didn’t have a regular chance to participate in dance and music.

The grant was brought to Rose’s attention earlier this fall by Lisa Lim from the Institute for Civic and Community Engagement (ICCE) on campus. Lim observed Rose’s work and wrote a grant proposal to the Haas Fund.

About three weeks ago, Lim informed Rose she would be receiving $25,000 for the 2007/2008 school year. The money from the grant includes a stipend for the student teachers who assist Rose and take on their own classes at various after-school programs in the neighborhood.

“It was always my dream that I could have students here at State who had gone through the curriculum and could come back and help me teach and have some compensation,” Rose said. “It’s nice for someone at that level to be able to teach and assist with some pay. The teachers are the ones who make this thing work.”

As for those students who help teach the children, they’re just glad Rose’s hard work is receiving some recognition.

“It’s really not about getting paid,” said Charlotte Nehm, 22, a senior majoring in dance who is a student teacher in Rose’s program. “It’s just about getting support for the program. The fact that someone wants to invest in this is good all around, and now we don’t have to worry about it falling through.”

This will be welcome news to some of the parents and children who depend on the free program. Tacing Parker, whose 10-year-old daughter, Alanna Johnson, takes classes from Rose and her student teachers twice a week, doesn’t know where she could take Alanna if it weren’t for the children’s program.

“I drove her all over the city last summer searching for a place where she could take some free classes, and we found nothing until we came upon Dr. Rose at the Bayview Cultural Center,” Parker said. “I would do anything for her to have this outlet. Music and dance is a part of our culture, but without any sort of training, there’s no way to cultivate it. It would be terrible for their talent to go underutilized.”

Her daughter Alanna, who performed in the New Moves Children’s Concert on Nov. 12, enjoys the program for the chances she gets to be on stage.

“The concert was good because we got to share our talent with other people,” she said. “We got to dance for our families, and we had a lot of fun.”

The Village Dancers has three sites in Visitacion Valley where it teaches dance to kids in after-school programs, and a fourth site in Bayview/Hunter’s Point was added this year. Rose also offers what she calls the “Saturday Special,” where the kids who show more of an interest in dance are welcome to come to SF State on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. for some serious training.

Rose exposes her students to various styles of dance, such as jazz, Haitian, Cuban and modern. She also teaches the Dunham technique, a modern dance technique created by the late Katherine Dunham and encourages the children to do some of their own research on Dunham, explaining the legacy she left for other African-American women and how important she was to the dance world.

“How many of these kids would otherwise learn about Katherine Dunham?” Tacing Parker asked, as Rose instructed the dancers to go home and look up Dunham on the Internet. “She was a celebrated African-American woman, and they might never know that.”

On a recent Saturday, before her Saturday Special dancers show up, Rose poured over pictures of children she has been moved by in past years of the children’s program. Some who started with her when they were 9 or 10 are now 16 years old, and are still dancing with her. Some she lost track of, and some, she knows, have fallen through the cracks.

She recently ran into a pregnant teenager she worked with when the girl was in elementary school. At least one of her students has gone to juvenile hall and she said she heard one of her past kids had contracted AIDS.

“There’s always a contrast between those you reach and those you don’t,” she said as she gazed at the pictures. “Some of the things that have happened to these kids just blow my mind. But this grant, it will help. At the very least, it will give those who really show an interest in dance to develop, to be involved.”