Together...
we can tell any life story.
Sponsors & Partners
TheatreWorkers Project (TWP) is a not-for-profit small business registered in the State of California and fiscally sponsored by Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA. Established in 1983 with funding by a California Arts Council Artist in Communities grant, TWP has been fortunate to have received funding from local and state agencies, individuals, and foundations. TWP values collaboration and has been proud to partner with numerous social service organizations, schools, and arts organizations.
Grants & Funding
TheatreWorkers Project is a not-for-profit arts organization focused on facilitating and presenting socially engaged theatre. Our funding comes from foundations, state, county and city grants and contracts, often in partnership with community organizations.
California Arts Council
California Arts Council is the primary state agency providing funding to a diverse number of arts organizations and their community partners throughout California. It is the mission of the California Arts Council to strengthen arts, culture, and creative expression as the tools to cultivate a better California for all. We support local arts infrastructure and programming statewide through grants, initiatives, and services. We envision a California where all people flourish with universal access to and participation in the arts.
Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles
As a leading, progressive arts and cultural agency, DCA empowers Los Angeles’s vibrant communities by supporting and providing access to quality visual, literary, musical, performing, and educational arts programming; managing vital cultural centers; preserving historic sites; creating public art; and funding services provided by arts organizations and individual artists. Formed in 1925, DCA promotes arts and culture as a way to ignite a powerful dialogue, engage LA’s residents and visitors, and ensure LA’s varied cultures are recognized, acknowledged, and experienced. DCA’s mission is to strengthen the quality of life in Los Angeles by stimulating and supporting arts and cultural activities, ensuring public access to the arts for residents and visitors alike.
California Humanities
California Humanities mission is to connect Californians to ideas and one another in order to understand our shared heritage and diverse cultures, inspire civic participation, and shape our future. As an independent nonprofit organization and a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities since 1975, California Humanities has promoted the humanities as relevant, meaningful ways to understand the human condition and connect us to each other in order to help strengthen California by producing, funding, creating, and supporting humanities-based projects and programs, eye-opening cultural experiences and meaningful conversations. For more than 40 years, California Humanities has awarded over $30 million in grants across the state, reaching every Congressional district.
Diane Middleton Foundation
On September 15, 1999 San Pedro Attorney Diane Middleton announced the formation of the Diane Middleton Foundation. Over the years, the Foundation has awarded grants to numerous socially active individuals, labor, and community organizations. Middleton has long been active in Harbor area labor, civil, and human rights issues and has served as a City of Los Angeles Housing Commissioner, Neighborhood Commissioner, and on the boards of many local agencies.
Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission
The Annual Grants Program supports the creative life of Pasadena by expanding public access to the arts in our community. Each year, through an application process, awards are made to eligible applicants to fund diverse programming that benefits the greater Pasadena community.
Fiscal Sponsor
TheatreWorkers Project is a not-for-profit small business registered with the State of California. We are proudly fiscally sponsored by Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA for theatre and school programs.
Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA
Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA (EST/LA) is the West Coast offshoot of The Ensemble Studio Theatre in NY. Founded in 1979, EST/LA has grown from salons in people’s homes to full productions of critically acclaimed award-winning plays. EST/LA’s membership includes over 150 theater professionals. Located in the Atwater Village Theater, the company creates an environment that encourages the initiation, exercise, and practice of artistic imagination and expression. We are dedicated to developing and producing new work by established and emerging American playwrights, providing a lifelong artistic home to our membership of theatre professionals and sustaining live theatre – the vital and unique interaction of artist and audience.
Donate to TheaterWorkers Project through Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA (EST/LA), a non-profit membership theatre company, for theatre and school programs. If you choose to donate today, your donation receipt will come from EST/LA, however all the money goes into a restricted fund from which a fiscal sponsor can then distribute to TheatreWorkers Project. This means that none of your donation will go towards paying income taxes, and your donation will be tax-deductible!
California Legal Research
California Legal Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to law libraries in California’s prisons and jails. The right of access to courts is fundamental to our democracy, but for many incarcerated people this right is meaningless without the ability to access a law library. If someone is unable to afford an attorney, without the tools to teach themselves the law they are unable to assert any of their legal rights. Self-taught lawyers – oftentimes referred to as “jailhouse lawyers” – have been at the heart of the fight against unconstitutional prisons and jails for the past 80 years. Whether working alone, or in conjunction with bar-admitted lawyers, they operate at every level of the legal system: from helping their cellmates fill out basic legal forms to filing writs in the Supreme Court of the United States. In fact, the case establishing the right to a public defender was filed by a man named Clarence Gideon, who taught himself the law while locked in a Florida prison. California Legal Research is also in the early stages of developing a reentry program, to provide paralegal training to jailhouse lawyers who are returning home.
Donate to TheaterWorkers Project through California Legal Research (CLR), a civil rights nonprofit, for special prison and reentry programs. If you choose to donate today, your donation receipt will come from CLR, however all the money goes into a restricted fund from which a fiscal sponsor can then distribute to TheatreWorkers Project. This means that none of your donation will go towards paying income taxes, and your donation will be tax-deductible!
Community partners
TheatreWorkers Project values collaboration. We partner with numerous social service organizations, schools, and arts organizations.
Friends Outside in Los Angeles County
The mission of Friends Outside is to assist children and families, prisoners, and former prisoners with the immediate and long-term effects of incarceration, and to act as a bridge between those we serve, the community at large, and the criminal justice system, thereby enhancing the character of justice. Friends Outside’s services maximize returns on investment for the government, donors, and taxpayers through cost-effective re-entry services which result in strengthened families, reduced crime, and improved life trajectories for the children in these families. Its threefold budgetary and programmatic growth since 2011 reflects not only the need for its services but also the organization’s potential. Friends Outside is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization Dads Back! Academy provides comprehensive services for up to 6 months including activities centered on Responsible Parenting, Healthy Marriages, Skills Building and an Economic Stability job preparation program for reentering fathers.
The Francisco Homes
The Francisco Homes provides holistic reentry support services and transitional housing for formerly incarcerated “lifers” on parole. Our homes are located in South Los Angeles. Our work is Faith-inspired and infused with Hope & Love. These spiritual gifts provide the cornerstone for all that we do and are the reason we maintain a less than one percent recidivism rate. The Francisco Homes offers hope and multi-faceted, holistic support to formerly incarcerated individuals aspiring to re-integrate back into the community. Guided by faith-inspired principles, The Francisco Homes encourages our community to acknowledge the worth and dignity in all people, opening the door of opportunity for conciliation and healing; building a society in which the re-entry process becomes restorative.
Dads Back! Academy
The Dads Back! Academy provides comprehensive services for up to 6 months including activities centered on Responsible Parenting, Healthy Marriages, Skills Building, and an Economic Stability job-preparation program for reentering fathers.
The Harry Bridges Institute
With nearly 20 years of operation, The Harry Bridges Institute was founded to meet a pressing need to educate a new generation of workers about the rich history of the labor movement; to demonstrate the working community and to showcase and celebrate the contributions of labor leaders as well as rank-and-file trade unionists, not only in the founding of unions, but in the continuous struggle for worker’s rights. The work of the HBI is aimed, not only at reviving the validity of these principles within the labor community, but also at “spreading the gospel” of trade unionism to the public at large. For decades, Americans have been told that unions are negative, and counterproductive to the ideals of American society, when in fact the opposite is true. A closer, more honest look reveals that many societal improvements – the benefits, etc. – have been earned by the blood, sweat, and tears of trade unionists, fighting for what they believed to be basic human rights.
Southern California Library for
Social Studies and Research
The Southern California Library documents and makes accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression so we can all imagine and sustain possibilities for freedom. SCL is a community library and archive located in South Los Angeles. Founded over 50 years ago, the Library holds extensive collections of histories of community resistance in Los Angeles and beyond. Everyone is welcome to use the Library's resources to research and put to practice the histories of everyday people working to create change.
Performance & Workshop Venues
TheatreWorkers Project is rooted in community-based programs that reach a diverse audience. We present work in a wide variety of venues, including these below.
School Partners
TheatreWorkers Project provides standards-based theatre experiences for public, private and specialized schools. Our goal is to encourage critical thinking as students learn about, create, perform, and view socially engaged theatrical works of art. Through grants and matching funds, school residencies and performance projects have included the institutions below.
