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2007 Social Innovator

Actors' Shakespeare Project

Social Issue Track: Empowering Youth through the Arts

Sponsoring Partner: Hunt Alternatives Fund

Incarcerated Youth at Play, an initiative of the Actors' Shakespeare Project

Incarcerated Youth at Play, an initiative of the Actors' Shakespeare Project, provides juvenile offenders with both tools and support to transform their lives. The project engages youth and staff in the creation of ensemble productions, trains DYS teachers to integrate Shakespeare into their classrooms and supports youth in continuing their artistic development when they leave DYS facilities. Through Shakespeare's powerful words and deeply human characters, participating youth, ages 13-17, are able to give voice to their stories, develop social, artistic, pre-professional and literacy skills, and focus their talents, emotions and energies on positive behaviors and activities as they return to the community.

Social Problem:

• DYS operates 95 programs, maintaining a committed caseload of over 2,300 youth on any given day and involving roughly 6,000 youth in its programs annually.
  

• Over the past 15 years, the number of committed boys has increased by 36% while the number of committed girls has increased 205%.

• The annual cost of incarcerating one young person in Massachusetts is $37,000.

• 35% of the youth return to the system within one year of discharge.
  

Key Accomplishments & Social Impact:

• Received an award from NFI Massachusetts for being a leader in working with girls in lockup.

• Provided training for 65 of 185 DYS teachers as part of Unlocking the Light, a statewide initiative to integrate the arts into DYS classrooms.
  

• DYS staff report that Incarcerated Youth at Play helps the girls develop positive behaviors, such as patience, cooperation, and the ability to compromise and be non-judgmental.
  

• Participating youth demonstrate improvement in critical social and pre-professional skills, including maintaining eye contact, listening respectfully, working as a group and giving constructive feedback.

Eighteen Months Goals:

• Pilot a new education and mentorship program, Shakespeare on the Out, with 8-10 girls who are leaving DYS facilities.

• Launch ensemble performance programming at a boys' facility.
  

• Serve a total of 132 youth and lead training for 115 teachers.
  

Total Philanthropic Investment - 18 months: