Community Works/California (CW) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using the arts and education as a catalyst for change among underserved populations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through its arts programs, they forge links between diverse cultures and communities, improve educational attainment, increase self-empowerment and social responsibility, and foster community development. CW primarily serves incarcerated populations and at-risk youth, offering arts programming at San Francisco County jails and post-release facilities, as well as schools, after-school programs, and juvenile detention sites. Many CW programs culminate in public art exhibits or performances.
For many Balboa High School students, incarceration of parents, relatives, and friends, as well as violence in their neighborhood, is an unfortunate fact of life. Seventeen-year-olds from Balboa High created the play Sentences and went to Washington, D.C., to perform it. Although not all the students who participated in the program are children of incarcerated parents, all live in communities that are impacted by the realities of incarceration and violence.
Successful practices from this project include:
- As part of a three-year grant, CW, with funding from the National Institute of Corrections, sent two staff members to work with the class at Balboa High. Mike Molina (one of the teachers) recruited students in the fall of 2004 by going to homerooms and lunch tables and reading poems he had written about his cousin being in jail, looking for teens with similar experiences. Most who signed up had had relatives in jail.
- The 14 students and two staff from CW met every day in a basement room filled with couches and murals.
- Former inmates were invited to the school to give accounts of their personal histories.
- Molina and another staff person from CW taped the students as they recounted their stories. These testimonials became the basis for their class project: a public performance of their play.
- The tape recordings were transformed into a script, and the students began memorizing their lines and putting emotion into their monologues.
- Theater director, John Warren of Unconditional Theater in Berkeley, was enlisted to help.
- The program at Balboa High was originally intended to serve as an in-class project with an after-school component. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, the after-school component was cut. Students compensated for this lack of time by practicing with family members at home, with each other at lunch or on the phone in the evening.
- The play includes hip-hop dance moves and a performance of the Haka, a Samoan warrior dance (seven of the Balboa students are Samoan, and two are half Samoan). Students also performed their own freestyle raps, read poems, and sang songs.
- Initially, the play was to be performed at several venues in San Francisco. However, Ruth Morgan, director of CW, received an invitation from a longtime acquaintance at the Child Welfare League's Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners that the Balboa High students come to Washington, D.C. to perform at a conference.
- During their springtime trip, students performed the play at Duke Ellington High School in Georgetown and at the conference of the National Child Welfare League at the Wardman Park Marriott. Duke Ellington High School is a public performing arts school in the Washington, D.C., area that draws mostly African American students from poor neighborhoods.
- In attendance at the National Child Welfare League conference were social workers, probation officers, and wardens — people who work with prisoners all the time but had never listened to what their children had to say.
Since the program's success was based in large part on the mentoring that occurred between the students and the staff from CW, future programs will have a more intentional focus on one-to-one mentoring.