Mission and Overview: The mission of North Carolina Theatre’s Theatre 4 Change Program is to use theatre games, exercises, role-playing tactics and processing to heighten awareness and encourage individual change in conflict situations and their resolutions for the youth population of the Raleigh area ages 4th-9th grade.

Location: Boys & Girls Clubs of Wake County.

Students: The youth involved are groups of 15-20 students gathered by the individual centers. The youth target for the project is the underserved youth and general students of Raleigh in grades 4-9.

Facilitator/Members: The program involves one director/facilitator. This individual leads the workshop sessions and directs the student actors in the development of performance material for the workshops. The current director/facilitator is Heather Patterson King, Education Director and Acting Instructor for the North Carolina Theatre, and former director of the ACT Out Ensemble social-issue theatre company of Indianapolis. The actors are student actors from the NCT Conservatory and Triangle area trained in conflict resolution theatre.

Testimonial:
"If I can help them to understand it is always better to think before you act, and that physical fighting and slanderous comments are never the right way to try and solve a problem, then I feel like I've made the best contribution I can to my community and to the world."
- Allison Bonner (Student Actor, 16, Theatre 4 Change)

Heather Patterson-King, former Director of the ACT Out Ensemble social-issue theatre, and current Education Director and Acting Instructor of the North Carolina Theatre leads the program. The program uses older actors from the North Carolina Theatre Conservatory to provide peer- on-peer education about conflict resolution.

Please contact Heather at hpking@nctheatre.com for more information.