Fifteen-year-old Takeyah Bowers didn’t know what to expect her first year in City Mission’s mentoring program. But by participating in a drama game last Thursday, she learned a valuable skill she can use in her difficult classes at Detroit Community High School.

“In the memory game you had to concentrate on who goes first and who goes last. It’s a lot of thinking involved in the game,” Bowers said. “I can use [the concentration techniques] in one of my classes I’m not really good in.”

Bowers, along with 39 other Brightmoor youth, meets weekly at City Mission with her mentor for character development, academic accountability and career counseling.

Beginning this month, drama arts will also be integrated into the mentoring curriculum once a month, to allow youth to express themselves, reinforce positive character traits and learn valuable skills that collaborate with what they are learning during their mentoring sessions, as well as in the classroom.

“They are working on mental preparedness so we’re going to do it with theatre, which is great because it’s a nice connection,” said Lisa Dobbin, artistic director of All The World’s A Stage, a non-profit theatre company that inspires and empowers young people through creative and innovative programs.  City Mission partnered with the company to teach drama arts in our mentoring and tutoring programs and at City Mission Academy.

“We have skills in acting; listening, concentration, observation and teamwork. We’re going to play three or four games [tonight] that really work on those skills in a fun exciting way,” Dobbin said on Thursday.

One game, called ‘Name Six’, focused on concentration under pressure. Mentors and mentees stood in a circle passing an eraser. When Dobbin said stop, whoever had the eraser had to name six to 10 items from a category Dobbin selected. The items had to be named before the eraser went around the circle again.

Mentor Carol Krause thinks drama arts adds an important element to the mentoring program. “It just seems like it brings out a lot more creativity in the kids,” she said. “I think it’s nice to have a mixture of the program we are doing [each week] and to have something like this.”

Our volunteers and partners enable us to provide this empowering and life changing program to young people in Brightmoor. Thank you to all of our mentors and to The Skillman Foundation, the Comcast Foundation and the Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan, which fund our mentoring program.