Life Stories for Disadvantaged and At-Risk Youth

Current Programs and Partnerships

Life Stories at Potomac Job Corps Center
TTL has worked with Potomac Job Corps Center since 2003 and currently implements three Life Stories programs on site each year, for an annual residency of 24 weeks. Through this partnership, 20 to 30 recently adjudicated and/or hard to place youth residing at this GED and vocational training center each year are given opportunities to view their personal and professional through a creative lens.

Life Stories at Horizon Club
The Theatre Lab began a partnership in 2006 with Horizon Club, a non-denominational after-school program operated by Calvary Baptist Church, which provides low-income and welfare dependent teens with academic, emotional and social encouragement and support. TTL served 12 students in the initial year of the partnership and will serve more than 20 in 2007.
             Partner Perspective (Link to Horizons Club Article)

Life Stories at Potomac Ridge Residential Facility
The Theatre Lab’s newest 8-week Life Stories partnership will begin spring 2007 in collaboration with Potomac Ridge, an intermediate-term care residential treatment facility for adolescents, ages 12-18, who have serious behavioral and emotional problems. The Theatre Lab anticipates a pilot program serving approximately 14 youth.

Life Stories at Community Bridges
In 2003, The Theatre Lab began a collaboration with Community Bridges, an award-winning community-based nonprofit serving at-risk middle school girls in the Long Branch community of Silver Spring. With the assistance of bilingual Theatre Lab faculty, we adapted our Life Stories model for approximately 30 young girls, who developed and performed their stories for peers, family members and senior citizens. These middle-school girls come primarily from lower-income, recently arrived families from Central America (65%), the Caribbean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia and live in a high crime neighborhood. Many of them have escaped war, extreme poverty and other hardships in coming to this country, and here they often face loneliness, cultural isolation, and academic neglect.  Life Storiesis a most compatible fit with Community Bridges’ youth development and self-empowerment goals for these young girls, and brings an arts component to their already fine academic, mentoring, and community leadership activities.  Life Stories returned to Community Bridges in 2004 and 2005 with a two-day improvisational program focusing on conflict resolution. Most recently we have adapted our Community Bridges Life Stories program to focus on leadership and ensemble building—a model we will expand in 2007.

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