 So, all right, here we are today, I am Harris and this is our logo, I'm a newbie as I mentioned. I love the logo because it's like, it's a circle, it's a couple of, you know, amorphous people may be hugging, you know. But for me there is something missing about the logo and I mean no disrespect. So, if I could just ask for everyone to quickly turn around, take a look at the folks around you. Tell me if you notice anything. Do you see any black people? Do we have anyone here from Central or South America? Great. Well, we don't really have a lot of people of color here. I see the same thing here that I see in the performance world. A lot of white people. And there's nothing wrong with white people improvising. I love improvising and I'm white. But it was said at many other of these talks that, you know, we all believe that Brown can save the world. But we can't save the world if we're only saving the wealthy and the franchise. We have to also consider the disenfranchised. So even though this is our logo, I'd like to see maybe the other parts if we consider something more a little bit like this. So, and this is where my story begins. These are the students that I teach. I teach at a Jesuit middle school in Portland, Oregon. Portland is basically the biggest city in Oregon and for those of you who don't know, Oregon is the state just above the state of California and just below Washington state. This was my first class I was invited to teach. I thought I was going to be teaching them how to go on stage and be funny and, you know, teach them to perform improv. And I want to pay careful attention to that young woman. Her name is Sandra. And I just want to start with a quote because the notion of improvisation is not foreign at all to black or Latin cultures, especially when you tie in the concept of music, right? Like improv is deeply embedded in rap, hip-hop and jazz. And here's a great quote from Quincy Jones who kind of puts all of that right into focus for us. Improv is universal. And it's really important to remember that. So I wanted to have, you know, a statesman of African American culture and art to kind of start my presentation. So, all right, I mentioned we're in Portland, Oregon. I kind of want to show you where that is. So hang on to your seats. It might make you a little bit dizzy, but, you know. So there we are over on the West Coast of the United States. And we're going to zoom down to a part of the city of Portland where most of the black and Latin and immigrant communities live. That's in the Northeast. We are associated with the Jesuit church, which you can see above the yellow pin, which is the school where I teach. There are about 70 students. 6th, 7th, and 8th grade is tuition-free, and it serves black, Latin, and immigrant communities. So, what I do is I teach based on these three concepts. You guys, I'm not here to teach you about improv. You already know, because you're professionals, the benefits of each of these types of approaches when teaching improv. However, what I'd like to focus on is this concept of story ownership, because what I have come to understand in working with communities where there's been trauma, either physical or verbal socioeconomic or political trauma, this notion of thank you, owning your own story is really important. So, I came to class. I mentioned thinking I was going to teach them how to go on stage and be funny. But as the only white person in the room, I was trying to be really careful about the suggestions that I would give for an exercise or a location or a scene to make sure it was something that everybody in the room could understand. And one day I ran out of ideas for what a scene should be about. So, I asked them, hey, what do you want this scene to be about? And this is what they told me. Yeah, not funny at all. So, we're all improvisers. What's the first thing we say when someone gives us a suggestion? Yes, sir. So, I said, okay, we'll do a scene about domestic violence. And that's when my teaching took a fairly drastic turn. And I realized I wasn't there to teach them how to be funny. I realized I was there to teach them how to create a space where they could dialogue using the tools of improv to discuss these incredibly important issues that were their ideas, their stories. So, you're all familiar with the mortified also known as I'm a tree. So, this is just a few examples of what it looks like when we took some of these ideas that they suggested and locked them out. In the background you'll see my assistant, Leanne, it was important for me to bring in a co-teacher who was a person of color. Again, all these suggestions were self-generated by the kids, not by me, in our cover picture. If you think for a second that it's wrong or appropriate or in some way not right to allow children to portray or talk about such difficult topics as suicide, I would politely disagree with you. They have a lot to say about these topics and very frequently their feelings are so pure as to blow you away. We did another exercise. Again, this is just a very quick overview. I haven't talked about this in a long time called opposites where they would say, okay, we're really upset about bullying. I'd say, okay, show me a tableau of what bullying looks like and give me a second tableau of what the solution might look like. What I'd like you to focus on is the spatial dynamics. What does the problem look like and then what does the solution look like in terms of where everybody in the room is placed. So, here's somebody in the family being teased and then here's the solution. Again, these are all self-generated. Here's a kid showing up at the cafeteria at school and no one wants to sit with her. Here's the solution. And then for bullying, here's someone who decides to trip a fellow student in the hallway. One person decides to do something about it and goes over to help and then everyone realizes maybe that person is onto something. So, we decided at the end of the first class we weren't going to do a show. I paired up the students with people of color important from the adult improviser community. I wanted them to see people who look like them on stage. We had a portion of the show that was just the kids. We had a portion of the show that was with the kids and the adults. But the night before the show I got a text from Sandra's mother saying, Sandra's not going to perform, she's too afraid. I said, well, can I text her? And she said, I don't want you to force my daughter to get on stage. I said, I won't. I told Sandra just show up. This is your team. Show up and just support them. And she said, okay. So, we did our show. Here are some of the adults and some of the kids acting out something on stage. As far as measuring what I do, I give a questionnaire at the beginning and the end of the class. Here's what one of those looks like. I tabulate all the information and kind of a master sheet. My questionnaire can probably use some work. But what I can tell you is after computing all the data, here is the great percentage of changes in each of these of the emotional and social metrics I've seen have changed. The only thing that hasn't changed but hasn't gotten worse is reading and understanding of body language, which I think is a fairly fascinating given that I'm asking them to do a lot of tabloid work. I've performed on stage and screen professionally with some of my comedy heroes and some of my acting heroes. I have been really fortunate, but it never really meant a whole lot to me. It didn't change my life. The thing that changed my life was doing this. Thank you very much.