2013-035 EDC-Arts - St Joseph's Historic Foundation $1,500

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NARRATIVE Organizational Profile Sacrificial Poets is a youth spoken word poetry organization that serves middle and high school youth in the Chapel Hill- Carrboro - Durham area, and currently operates under the fiscal sponsorship of the Hayti Heritage Center. The Sacrificial Poets' mission is to inspire, foster, and promote artistic expression, personal growth, and social justice for youth in our collective communities through the use of the spoken and written word. In addition to teaching writing and performance workshops throughout the state and hosting regular youth poetry events, Sacrificial Poets selects a team of six youth ages 13-19 every year to take to the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival(as seen on HBO). The SacPoe youth team has made semifinals at BNV for the last four consecutive years. "Graduates" of the Sacrificial Poets youth team have performed at the Sundance Film Festival hosted by Robert Redford, the 2010 Bonarroo Music and Arts Festival, placed as adult finalists in the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam, and had poems broadcast on North Carolina Public Radio. Sacrificial Poets believes that youth as a whole are one of the largest and most marginalized groups in society. Their quantitative"inexperience" is the basis for overlooking their wisdom and insight, which are qualitatively unique. The youth often have perspectives on societal issues that are distinct from those of any other group, and which are often lost by the individuals themselves as innocence surrenders to adulthood and conditioning to societal norms of thought. The goal of Sacrificial Poets is to provide local youth an opportunity to share their voices and to tell their story. Sacrificial Poets does not empower youth, rather we seek to create spaces where young people can empower themselves. We achieve this by providing both a means by and a venue in which they can tell their own stories using their own words. Our unique YouTh ink, Curriculum gives youth the tools and safe space they need to express themselves, share their experiences, and kindle a greater sense of power, purpose and belonging. Following the work of educators across the nation, our programming seeks to promote a "humanizing pedagogy," an approach to teaching and leaming that facilitates emotional as well as intellectual development. It is our belief and experience that learning to find one's individual voice in a group environment fosters a sense of community which promotes individual growth, empathy towards others, and civic engagement. The YouTh ink. Curriculum fuses creative writing and performing arts with explorations of identity and issues of social justice, and is designed to benefit youth in five specific ways: enhance emotional literacy, facilitate identity exploration, refine writing and analytical skills, develop performance and public speaking competency, and build self-confidence. On the academic front, YouTh ink. helps participants develop many of the formal writing techniques they are studying in school, and which fall into the oral and written language categories of the NC Standard Course of Study, as well as the communication, analysis, and culture sections of the NC Arts Education Standards. In order to develop their own communication skills, participants learn to create original performances which they will write, memorize, choreograph, and present.