We are thrilled to be receiving a 2014 Major Grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities to support our programs.
MAP’s artistic director Meg Sullivan was asked to be on the speaking panel at The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities announcement of major grant awards. The following are her remarks:
Hello, I’m Meg Sullivan, the Executive Artistic Director of the Manton Avenue Project. I’m so pleased to be able to talk with you all today. It’s such an honor for me and for The Manton Avenue Project to be here. I want to thank Elizabeth and Carole Ann for inviting me to speak today, and the entire Council for the great honor of being a recipient of a major grant this year. It is truly thrilling for us.
The Manton Avenue Project or MAP was founded 10 years ago by Jenny Peek, who modeled the project after The 52nd St Project in NYC.
Our mission is to unleash the creative voices and unique potential of young people living in Olneyville by uniting them with professional artists to create original theatre.
MAP is founded on the belief that all children, even those living in lower income settings, have the potential to become tomorrow’s creative thinkers and community leaders, and we believe that the theatre arts offer unique and immeasurable opportunities for kids to experience and build their confidence, empathy, resilience, critical thinking, and imagination. Creating original theatre helps young people shape their own identities, connect with others, and grow a deeper investment in their communities and their world.
We teach playwriting afterschool to kids, starting in the 3rd grade and then we produce those plays professionally with adult actors, directors, and designers — generous volunteer artists from across this great state. We work with the same kids each year for at least five years, and this year have started a teen project for those kids who have completed all five of our annual playwriting classes.
We teach playwriting to kids, but we do so much more than that.
We offer young people from a lower income, immigrant-rich community a way to have a voice in a public sphere where voices like theirs are often absent.
And we honor those voices by never editing their plays.
MAP kids add to important, timely conversations on topics such as bullying, the state of our rivers and oceans, the history of voting rights, the importance of local food and community gardens, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and the ways music changes lives and society.
MAP kids think critically and come up with creative solutions to the challenges that their characters face, finding thoughtful alternatives to violence and unkindness.
MAP kids learn that what they have to say is worthwhile and important and use the safe space we provide – in our clubhouse classroom and on the public stage – to tell their stories, to add their voices to the discourse, raise their questions and concerns, and to offer their imaginative, brilliant, and compelling solutions.
In November 2012, we received a mini-grant from RICH to complete our project – All in Favor; the voting plays. Thanks to that grant, we were compelled to dig deeper, to engage the playwrights in challenging discussions about the history of US voting rights and who has the right to vote today. The discussions, framed by playwriting techniques in monologue, dialogue, character development, conflict and resolution, lead to 9 engaging original plays – plays about the right to vote and the right to sing. Plays about freedom for pets and freedom for immigrants. Most importantly, plays that engaged the voices of Olneyville kids in civic discourse on the public stage.
We were hooked. Because of the success of that program, how well it aligned with our mission, and how organically it advanced and grew our mission, we decided that all of our programs needed even more of a social and community engagement component, bringing guests to discuss timely topics with the kids; discussing, questioning, engaging with new ideas about how our plays can function to educate as well as entertain, to move people to action as well as to move them to feel, to ask questions as well as to find solutions.
And that brings us here today. With our Major Grant from RICH, we will complete several projects. Our 5th grade class has already developed an incredible play about bullying and becoming upstanders, which we hope to tour around the state.
Our next project will be the Music and Social Change plays, in which we will learn about how music has been used in US social movements, and we’ll have special guests to teach workshops – songwriting, hip hop, rocknroll, maybe even bluegrass.
Over the summer, we’ll learn about Electricity and talk about how our communities use and rely on it. Then we’ll ask ourselves, what if we didn’t have it anymore?
In the fall, we’ll ask what it means to be a good neighbor, and we’ll focus on Olneyville as a neighborhood, asking ourselves, how can I make my community a better place? How can I be a better neighbor?
What an incredible commitment this state is making to MAP kids and their creative expression. Because of RICH’s investment in imagination, young people from an underserved community are learning each day that they have voices that matter, that their unique creative minds can inspire thought, discussion, feeling and action in a public space, and that the arts and humanities are a crucial part of the texture of our lives.