Young Storytellers, formerly widely known as the Young Storytellers Foundation, is an arts education non-profit operating primarily in Los Angeles. Young Storytellers currently serves elementary, middle, and high school students in Southern California, including the cities of Los Angeles, Culver City, Santa Monica, and Burbank, New York City, Austin, Texas, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Akron, Ohio. Young Storytellers supports students in Title 1 schools; these are schools and school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty in which academic performance tends to be low and the obstacles to raising performance are the greatest. The program improves writing and self-confidence while also focusing on social and emotional learning and including components of Learning for Justice's Social Justice Standards. History Young Storytellers began as an in-school mentoring program in 1997 - by three screenwriters Mikkel Bondesen, Brad Falchuk, and Andrew Barrett upon learning about cutbacks in funding for creative arts programs in the Los Angeles public schools. The first school adopted into the program was Playa Del Rey Elementary School, an elementary school in Culver City. The program was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 2003. Programs The organization benefits elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. In 2016, 20th Century Fox invited Young Storytellers students to participate in the Fox Writers Intensive. Script to Stage The Script to Stage program is its main program whereby students in fifth grade write short stories in the course of nine weeks later to be performed by actors on stage. Students in the programs are selected on multiple criteria by teachers and can include students who are not proficient in the English language, have difficulty with reading and writing, have difficulties interacting with their peers socially, have learning differences, or are on the Autism spectrum. The Script to Stage program produces 1200 scripts per year. Collaborative Stories This 9-week program is based on the foundation of Script to Stage, but facilitates more collaboration as writers work together to tell a story through large group sessions guided by 1-2 mentors. When their story is complete, students watch it come to life with the help of professional actors at a virtual Big Show. As part of this program, students reflect on challenges and unfairness they’ve seen or experienced in their own lives, and work with the group to find nonviolent solutions to these events through metaphor and story. This program began in Spring 2020 as an adaptation for