YES YES YES! WE GOT OUR VERY FIRST GRANT: THE LEEWAY FOUNDATION ART AND CHANGE GRANT!!! TO HOST A SENIORS STORYTELLING DAY!!!!! SORRY ABOUT THE ALL CAPS BUT I’M HAVING SERIOUS TROUBLE CONTAINING MY EXCITEMENT!!!!!!!!
This grant – whose objective is to support art projects for social change – is pretty competitive and I am still in shock that we won. As you know, our project began only months ago with two core media: the classroom and the web. With the Leeway grant, we can now add two new components to our multi-media storytelling project: performance and video.
Seniors Storytelling Day will be an event, happening at the end of this year in a public venue in Philadelphia, where teens and seniors will get up on stage together, to tell the seniors’ stories to a physical audience. During the months leading up to the event, the teens and seniors will collaborate closely, and the teens will document the process in writing and video, so that this event is not only about one day of stories but also half a year of the teens’ and seniors’ personal transformations.
I can't even tell you how pumped I feel about all this. Even before starting this entire storytelling project, it has honestly always been my personal dream to connect seniors with teens (two groups who are often misrepresented by society) and give them a chance to empower one another in a way that we as observers may not know how.
Stay tuned. We’ll tell you our plans as they unfold. (OK, GOTTA GO SCREAM SOME MORE. I’M JUST SO SUPER EXCITED!!!!!!!)
