 Thank you. I want to tell you about two young people I work with, Jenae and Jason. They're from Jersey City. About two months ago, they went out to a backyard party to celebrate their friends graduating from high school. A couple days later, I got a phone call. There's something tragic went down at the party. Upon leaving the party, two of our young people got shot by stray bullets. One watched the other get hit in the arm before she was shot in her leg, and they both laid on the ground until it's being taken to the hospital, being treated, and then being released later that night. Jenae and Jason, they're students of our Development School for Youth, one of the programs of the All Stars Project. Let me just tell you a little bit about the All Stars Project. It is a national nonprofit organization founded 38 years ago. Our mission is to transform the lives of youth and poor communities using the developmental power of performance and partnership with caring adults. It's an amazing organization. And there we get to create free programs, free outside of school programs, where we are just steeped in our fundamental approach in using techniques and tools of improvisational performance in everyday life. We use these tools to help foster development for young people in poor communities. And as the city leader of the All Stars Project of New Jersey, I work to bring about social transformation. Because I really do believe that the best way to bring young people growing up in poor communities into the mainstream is by afterschool development. And it really does spark their desire to learn and grow. So we see all the time that there's opportunities for our young people to be exposed to possibilities, and we give them tools to act on them. And all of our programs, our young people create new things. They try new things. They become more worldly. They create new performances for themselves and new possibilities for their communities. Like in our talent show program. That's where young people perform and produce in talent shows all over their neighborhood. But they're also engaging in the performance of community building, where they're getting their friends and their families to support and create a positive environment, both in the talent shows and in the communities. And our internationally award-winning program, Operation Conversation Cops and Kids. It's amazing. We bring inner city kids together with police officers and a performance workshop. Get that. Where you get to listen to each other and then create a new type of relationship with one another. We really do allow our young people to see on and act on all different types of possibilities. And this is vividly true for the program that Jenae and Jason are in, the Development School for Youth. Also known as the DSY. And the DSY, young people go through 14 weeks of workshops, which are essentially rehearsals. And we connect kids growing up in poor communities with leaders in our affluent corporate community. And the kids get to try all different types of things, like networking skills and mock job interviews. And they get to rehearse these new business performances in corporate settings. And it's just, it just really is amazing to just see. We really understand that our kids sometimes only get to see these businesses from the outside looking in or from the sidewalk looking up. But we really want to focus on creating ensembles everywhere. So we do that all throughout our programs. And this particular program culminates in a paid summer internship at Fidelity or Port Authority, which is the internships that Jenae and Jason were headed for. And these internships are not like job force programs or workforce development programs. They're actually structured in a way where 16-year-olds get this. They can use everything they've learned from performance and improv in each and every scene of their life. Did you hear what I said? In a corporate setting, you can use performance and improv to help create their scenes with all different types of people as they go on into this uncharted territory with unfamiliar faces and they create their life with all different types of people. So the programs, of course, speak for themselves, but back to the day that I heard that their lives were threatened. I honestly was not prepared for what happened next when I met Jason and Jenae's family at the community center in Jersey City. Jason's 17 years old and he's been living in Jersey City his whole life with his single mom and his little brother. And he's sitting there and he's acting all nonchalant. He got his cast on and sent a sling. He's trying to prop it up on the table. He keeps telling everybody he's fine. And I go, Jason, well, tell me, how are you holding up? And he's like, I'm good. And I'm like, listen, you don't have to save your feelings for the internship. You can get the internship next summer. We can focus on this summer for you to mentally recuperate and physically recuperate. And he's like, wait for it. He goes, this type of shit happens to me on any day for any of our kids. That's why I'm here. I'm trying to do something different. I'm trying to create a new performance in my life. I wasn't ready for that. Jenae, who's sitting across from him, she looks at him. Jenae goes next to her grandfather. Her mom wasn't there because her mom works multiple jobs in long hours. So she wasn't there to be there with Jenae as she recovered. But Jenae's also 17. And he looks, she looks at Jason and she nods like, in a glance. If I just go stay home this summer, or if I go get a job at the mall, there's nothing different about that. In fact, I probably will sit home and wallow in self pity by what happened to me. She told me that this internship is more than making money this summer. She said that this is the best way that she's going to be able to cope with this incident because it encourages her to move past it to make new experiences with people she doesn't know in an environment she's like not accustomed to at all. I couldn't believe it. Our young people, their response to misfortune was to look at their obstacles as offers. They realized and they sure as hell was making it clear to me that these were not special cases. These threats were not special to them. This was their reality. And in the DSY, they learned to navigate their reality by looking for seeking out and discovering opportunities and offers to build with and to build on. It was mind blowing to me. I have to admit I kind of, I kind of wasn't ready or I was challenged in my ability to improvise at the moment. So they asked me, they asked me, they asked me for my help. They said, can you help get my family on board with me starting the internship on time? I'm like they had no intentions of stopping. They had no intentions of pausing this experience. They were like, I'm ready to go. I need your help. I was like, yes. And I couldn't stop there. Like after they told me that they're ready, I have to get on board with that. So I didn't stop there. I went and I talked to their internship supervisors and the champions of fidelity investments and port authority. And I got them on board to create not only a supportive working environment for Janay and Jason, but also a place where they can also recover. All we did that day was improvise. The entire day was improvised. And that's kind of like one of the best things I love about my job at the All Stars. We use improv as a tool in all of our programs. And at the same exact time, all of our programs are improvisation. We don't anticipate what's happening next. There's no way you could have called me up and told me that this was going to be my story for that day. And I knew how it was going to end. We don't get together and create this thing that's going to then end up to be this thing here at the end. No, it's all the performers, all the people are actively creating the next thing. It's a collective, a collective space, a collective activity. I was reminded there in that room in the community center, the devastation of poverty and how it impacts in deprives people's ability to access social resources and how it stifles the development of young people. And how crucial it is to support young people's ability to build with anything that comes their way. To improvise as an alternative to letting their obstacles defeat them. These young people, they took on a new world view. They took on the mindset of an improviser. They began to look around and they continue to look around in each and every scene that they're in. They get to see what characters are in their scenes and how do they interact with them? And then they decide to build. They decide to build with all of that. And by doing that, they create and recreate their lives every single day. Thank you so much for allowing me to share their stories with you. Thank you so much.