Sponsors

All Stars Project

All Stars Project, Inc. (ASP) is the American pioneer for development and developmental learning through performance. Founded in 1981, ASP creates and sponsors outside-of-school educational and performing arts activities for tens of thousands of poor and minority young people, sponsors community and experimental theatre, develops leadership training and pursues volunteer initiatives that build and strengthen communities.

ASP’s national and international headquarters is a 31,000-square-foot performing arts and development center on New York City’s West 42nd Street, and it runs programs in New York City, Chicago, IL, Newark, NJ, and the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. ASP receives no government funding, and its innovative programs are supported by a unique private-sector “endowment of friendship.”

ASP has been an innovator and leader in moving after-school in the U.S. beyond its tradition of remediation, and in introducing development, performance and creativity into the broad educational culture. ASP’s newest initiative, UX, is an amalgam of developmental learning activities, produced by and for our communities. UX gives students/creators of all ages the opportunity to make life/learning discoveries, free of charge.

Through our sponsorship of Performing the World and other formal and informal cultural exchanges and connections, ASP is a vibrant nexus for the international community of practice and conversation about developmental performance. More than 7,000 people from 50 countries have visited the ASP’s center for performing arts and youth development since its opening in 2003.

Over the last two decades, dozens of ASP youth, staff, volunteers and donors have served as ambassadors for performance and development to the UK, Chile, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, The Netherlands, China, South Africa and Taiwan. Around the world, thousands of young people and adults who partner with them in activities influenced by or connected to ASP, identify themselves as “All Stars.”

UX is reaching out around the world to promote this performatory approach to human development, and to connect with those who are already building developmental activities and organizations.

To learn more about the All Stars Project and its programs, go to www.allstars.org.

East Side Institute

The East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy is an international educational, training and research center for developing and promoting alternative and radically humanistic approaches in psychology, therapy, education and community building. The Institute is best known for social therapeutics, an approach to human development that relates to people of all ages and life circumstances as social performers and creators of their lives. It is practiced globally as both a group-oriented, development-focused psychotherapy and a methodology with broad application in educational, cultural, health and community settings. Founded in 1985 by social therapy’s creator, the late Fred Newman, and director Lois Holzman, the Institute has introduced this cultural-performatory practice to tens of thousands of educators, mental health and medical workers, scholars and grassroots community organizers in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North and South America.

Recognized globally as a unique “community think tank,” the Institute builds bridges between university-based and community-based practices and brings the traditions and innovations of each to the other. Through dozens of online and NYC-based courses, our training programs, scholarly writings and international travels, we work to advance worldwide the most successful and cutting-edge approaches to human development and learning—those that tap, re-ignite and support the kind of human creativity, performance and developmental play so desperately needed if people are to transform the world.

In 2001, Holzman and Newman initiated Performing the World to bring together—across disciplines, professions and national borders—those who link performance-based activities and social change. They and the Institute partnered with the All Stars Project in 2008 to bring Performing the World to New York City, giving it a physical home and both broadening its scope and deepening its community ties.

The Institute is a nonprofit 501©(3) organization staffed by dedicated volunteers and sustained financially by individuals who support its mission. Our unique brand of social entrepreneurialism has allowed us to take risks, to venture beyond accepted conceptions and models, to create new approaches to social development and cultural transformation and to bring people together to create with all of our diversity and differences.

To learn more about the East Side Institute and its programs, go to eastsideinstitute.org.