ABOUT FACE YOUTH THEATRE
About Face Youth Theatre was created as a safe space for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning young people to tell their stories and create community. The exclusion of queer history and dialogue from schools, and the consistent discrimination and violence suffered by queer youth in our school system are the most immediate problems About Face Youth Theatre addresses with our multi-tiered programming.
OUR MISSION
The Youth Theatre is an identity-affirming environment where LGBTQA youth are provided:
- rigorous artistic training,
- access to professional LGBTQ artists and activists,
- college and artistic mentorship, and community forums
- intergenerational dialogue on the most pressing issues facing queer youth
OUR GOALS
- Youth Involvement: Youth are the center and most important part of the Youth Theatre programs. They are directly involved in the planning, creation and structure of the program.
- Leadership Development: The Youth Theatre is specifically structured to empower our youth to become leaders in their communities and schools. Through activist training, youth gain expertise in political and social topics concerning the LGBTQ community. Through performance and docudrama training, youth gain important public speaking skills and interviewing skills.
- Vision: The Youth Theatre’s guiding vision is to move queer youth from marginalization to positions of inclusion and power. About Face has committed to extend this vision beyond its regional impact to foster the larger, national youth movement.
- Strategic and Effective: The Youth Theatre is one of the nation’s most important centers for queer youth empowerment and activism, having reached tens of thousands of young people since 1999. Past achievements demonstrate the capacity to serve as a major point of public engagement on issues affecting queer youth, such as HIV/AIDS, coming out, bigotry and homelessness. This year we received a MAC Fund grant which underwrites the outreach tour to perform at ten Chicago Public Schools for free. The Queer Youth Fund grant would allow for the Youth Theatre to travel to more schools, communities, and outside the Chicagoland area.
- Social Change Impact: Through our sustained, deep multi-year investigations into queer homelessness, HIV/AIDS and discriminatory sex education, and violence against LGBTQ people, the youth theatre is creating sustainable change in our community. Through our artistic work, we are changing the conversation with youth leading the dialogue.
- Capacity Building: This year About Face Theatre welcomed Bonnie Metzgar as our new Artistic Director and Rick Dildine as our new Managing Director. The next year is dedicated to diversifying our staff and board, and to developing new fundraising and evaluation techniques, and increasing the Youth Theatre staff size.
- Innovative: The Youth Theatre and its dedication to deep investigations into queer issues which are almost always misrepresented by the media and thus misinterpreted by the culture, has changed the city of Chicago. For example, our Youth Theatre ensemble has recently become certified sexual health peer educators and have returned to their respective high schools with important information they are actively disseminating to their fellow students.
- Collaborative: About Face Youth Theatre collaborates with several agencies: Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Howard Brown Health Services, the Broadway Youth Center, the Center on Halsted, the Coalition for Education on Sexual Orientation, and GLSEN (local and national), to name a few. The company’s collaborative nature is central to the achievement of the About Face mission.
- Replicable: The crises that face LGBTQ youth are not unique to Chicago; these issues resonate nationwide. The Youth Theatre model is flexible and can be replicated by other organizations. A major goal of the Youth Theatre is to expand its reach to a national level through publication, teaching residencies and touring performances and instruction.
