 All right, hi everybody. We're back at the Neurodiversity Matters Conference. And in this segment, we are going to be spotlighting programs that SDE partners with or works on. And I'm very happy and proud to introduce Anna Zimbo, Rachel, and Shelley, who all work with the Miracle Project New England. And I'm going to turn it over to them and let them tell you a bit about their organization and open it up in case you guys have questions. So take it away. Great, thank you, Clay. So I just wanted to start first by thanking Spectrum Theater Ensemble for inviting us. We're really excited to be here and to get to talk a little bit about what we do at the Miracle Project. So I'm going to start off. I am Anna Zimbo, as Clay said. I'm the program director. And so I'm going to tell you just a little bit about who we are and then turn it over to my awesome movement specialist and music director, Rachel and Shelley, to share a little bit more about the fun stuff that we do. So the Miracle Project New England is modeled after the Miracle Project in Los Angeles, California, which was founded by Elaine Hall in the early 2000s. If anybody watching is familiar with Autism the Musical, they're the subjects of that HBO documentary that aired also in the early 2000s. So we're modeled after that program. We've been working here in the Providence, Rhode Island area since 2017. So we follow the methodology of the Miracle Project and sort of the general structure that they use for bringing both neurodivergent artists and individuals together with neurotypical teens and adults, neurotypical peers to create art. So we function with a reverse inclusion model where we create a space supported and that is supportive of people on the spectrum of neurodivergent individuals. And then we bring neurotypical peers into that environment through art. So as I mentioned, we've been working since 2017. We've had several week-long annual summer camp programs. And then this year in 2020, we were really excited to launch our first after-school program, which started in February of 2020. We have transitioned that fully online at this point in the current circumstances, and that's been going pretty well. But that's kind of us in a nutshell. So we are a performing and expressive arts program. We integrate theater, improvisation, movement, and music into our program. We produce a showcase at the end of every program that integrates original music that's been written with our autistic artists' choreography that's been generated by our specialists and inspired by our participants, and also stories and improvisation that come from the scene work and the things that we do during our programs. So overall, we focus on individual and group talents. We like to highlight all of our awesome individuals that come to us. And we're also really focused on building relationships and that peer model of having a neurodiverse group of people creating art together. Before I turn it over, I just wanted to also mention that we can't do what we do alone. We partner with a lot of great organizations, including Spectrum Theater Ensemble. We also partner with our flagship program, The Miracle Project in Los Angeles. We partner with Brown University, which Rachel could talk a little bit more about too. We also partner with Bailey's Team, which is a wonderful fundraising organization in our area that supports lots of programming for people with autism. We partner with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, and like I said before, of course, Spectrum Theater. So right now, I'm going to turn it over to Shelly Katch, our music director, to talk a little bit about what she does. Hi, and thank you for having us here. The music that's part of The Miracle Project is focused on connection, the joy of creating, the joy of expressing ourselves musically, the joy of being able to create in the moment with others, and also the ability that music has to connect us and help us feel like we belong with others. And that's been an interesting challenge this after-school program as we have focused on how to help our group of participants, our students, all of them, feel connected and like they belong while we're on a Zoom platform. So generally, what we end up doing over the scope of the entire program is we have some fun musical warm-ups that we do so that we treat our bodies well in terms of warming up our voices the way that our movement people and in acting also warm up the body and warm up the mind. And then what I do is focus on creating songs together. There are a few songs that are part of The Miracle Project from Los Angeles that every person who's ever been part of the music, part of The Miracle Project knows and sings. There's a welcoming song and an ending song. So we have some pillars at the beginning and the end that everyone's familiar with. And then we play around with ideas that convey messages that we want to create. And we put those into musical forms. So everyone can contribute lyrics and we listen to the way that people say those lyrics and their voices and we help stretch those out into melodies. So the songs that we've done so far in the last couple of years have focused on having a voice and what that means in terms of a metaphor and being able to sing but also be heard. We have a song called Count Me In which is connected to like, there's no about us without us. It's about wanting to be heard and listen to and taken into account. This year we had a song about belonging that we belong together which helped us sing together and move together to help us connect over the Zoom platform. So basically we are looking for fun. We are creating in the moment and we're helping us connect through a range of musical expression. And I think next is Rachel. Hey, hi. Yeah, I'm Rachel Gallivan. And I just wanted to address something that Anna mentioned earlier in terms of partnerships. We have a wide range of wonderful partners and a little brief history. I teach a course with Julie Strandberg at Brown called Artists and Scientists as Partners which looks at the role of art on people with neurological disorders specifically Parkinson's and autism. And with the autism piece, it was way back in 2014 that we learned about and started this beautiful partnership with the Miracle Project and it has grown to what it is now what Anna described. So we are very proud and pleased to be able to have the Miracle Project as a site placement for our undergraduate students to really experience how art changes lives. And so I'm fortunate enough to be the movement person and I get to take in all the wonderful creativity of my collaborators, Anna and Shelly and bring in movement. And movement as we all know brings us certainly great physical benefits but I think almost more importantly in a neurodiverse population it allows us to bring some kind of emotional release and emotional self-regulation, self-expression and really a sense of heightened self-confidence. And we see that each week as we move through the music and drama and dancing. Shelly mentioned we have certain songs that are just a part of our weekly practice and so our campers, our actors also have certain warmups that they can rely on that they know they will start their weekly lesson with. And then we get to move on to something where they move with a little more individuality and they get to call out the kind of movement the kind of music they want to do and they get to do that individually. So here is a chance for them to kind of express themselves build that confidence and be that individual and really learn a pride through movement and through the physical nature kind of separated themselves from the thinking aspects. There's just moving and really feeling the joy of movement. And then we get to work on this wonderful piece usually after Shelly has created some incredible music for us to follow. And the fun part there is that we are creating as a community and as the movement director I am taking cues off of the actors and watching their movements, listening to the lyrics that perhaps they have co-created with Shelly. And together this becomes such a beautiful collaboration and a beautiful example of how music movement theater all of this builds community, builds our connection. So really the movement part goes from this warm-up that we start in the beginning of the class that prepares us for the later movement in community and sandwiched between that is this chance for them to be expressive and move in their own very specific and particular way. And I just feel quite blessed to be a part of this group through movement, theater, music, it just fills my soul and we get to see that each week. Even through Zoom we are feeling the love and the beauty and the power of art to heal us and to connect us. Absolutely, awesome, thank you, Rachel. That actually what you were just saying gave me a thought about how we have transitioned to Zoom in this virtual platform and one of the sort of happy surprises that we've found is how engaged everyone is. We were nervous at the start and I think even in-person classes sometimes those nerves come up, we're not sure who will walk through the door, where everyone will be at when they're coming into our space but we've been really pleasantly surprised with how engaged everyone has been, especially in the virtual medium. And I have to give a little shout out to our autism support specialists and our autism support staff. So we're really lucky at the Miracle Project although we are not a therapeutic program, we are able to be supported by people with therapeutic backgrounds. So we have a phenomenal speech pathologist, we have a phenomenal occupational therapist who can help us as teachers, help our co-actors, our neurotypical peers come in and be the best kind of support and co-creators that we can be. So we've been really pleasantly surprised with how they've been able to support us in supporting our actors transitioning to this new medium. So I think that about wraps it up for us. I'll throw it back to Clay and thank you so much for having us. Awesome, thank you guys so much and we're excited to have you here this summer. I've known you all for a long time, you're great. So fantastic. So it's 1.52 right now. Our next session is logging on and we'll start at 2 p.m. But we have a little bit of a breather.