Truth Tellers Theater Ensemble is an intergenerational after school Arts & Advocacy program designed to support teens with lived experience in foster care, kinship care, adoption, and more. The Ensemble is a collaborative program of Treehouse Foundation’s HEROES Youth Leadership Program and the Arts Integration Studio. Together the Ensemble creates a performance to engage, inform, and inspire others to help make positive changes in the child welfare system.
2024 – Year Two
2023 – I Was and I Am: Still Here
Each Wednesday, as the sun sets in Holyoke, the Truth Tellers Theater Ensemble comes together at the Arts Integration Studio to create, share stories and lived experiences, dispel myths about foster care and adoption, and help raise awareness that will create positive change in the child welfare system.
In the fall of 2023, Arts Integration Studio partnered with the Treehouse Foundation’s HEROES Youth Leadership program to launch Truth Tellers Theater Ensemble. The Ensemble includes an intergenerational, youth-centered group of creative, thoughtful, and motivated people who come together to collaborate in theater-making to share their stories of lived experience with foster care, kinship care, and adoption. This spring, Truth Tellers finished I Was and I Am: Still Here, a performance piece designed to raise awareness and dispel myths about foster care and adoption, and to help create positive change in the child welfare system.
In May, the Ensemble performed at Holyoke High School for 80 students; for the Western Massachusetts Department of Children and Families staff in Holyoke; for Legislators and the general public at the Massachusetts State House, and for a filmed invitational performance at Easthampton Media.
Liz Almonte, a Mount Holyoke senior and AIS associate teaching artist, writes,
“Truth Tellers offers a world of new possibilities for Western Mass teens. The youth have been able to describe who they are in the context of the foster system. Unsurprisingly, they have beautiful opinions of themselves, and they have strong values in community, safety, and well-being. I am excited to continue to see how they grow throughout this process and what kinds of artistic works they will produce.”
TTTE is supported by the Treehouse Foundation and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (This program is supported in part by a grant from the Easthampton Cultural Council and the Holyoke Local Cultural Council, local agencies, which are supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency), Scarlet Sock Foundation, the Beveridge Family Foundation, the Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership.
