Youth Venture

Bridging the language and cultural gaps in our community through the theater arts.

The Children's Bilingual Thearter is a service project that helps the Spanish first language speakers to improve their English and Spanish second language speakers to improve their Spanish. They both benefit from theatre, learning about public speaking and working with different people. I am Jordan, Founder and Artistic Producer. I have been very excited to see the project’s many success stories including working with over 90 volunteers as cast and crew and performing to over 3000 audience members. We welcome students who have recently immigrated and are recommended by their teachers and include school Spanish club members and other volunteers. It was a little scary when we started but with community support raised $3,000 in donations and schools decided to host the shows. Then 17 kids staged a bilingual play at 4 schools.2007, “Cinderella Eats Rice and Beans” a salsa hip-hop bilingual musical was presented as the 3rd musical for the group. Since 2003 CBT has been able to raise over $9,000 for production costs and received $20,520 in grants and scholarships and over $9.000 in donations. I hope to continue to help ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) students improve their English language skills, to help youth learning or interested in learning Spanish and to encourage my community to bridge the language and cultural gap through theatre arts.