Special thanks to DAREarts for sharing this piece with ArtBridges. For more information on DAREarts, please visit DAREarts.com 

Written by DAREarts artist-educator Glenn Marais.

“What Is A DARE? What Do You Think?

What is a Dare? It’s a challenge, a risk, a step into the unknown that requires courage and determination. To take a DARE on is to embrace discipline, action, respect, and excellence. These four tenants are the cornerstones of DAREarts, an arts and leadership program that takes children and youth from marginalized communities and gives them an opportunity to become leaders by developing belief in themselves.

How do they do this? DARE challenges you to uphold these principles of character with one hundred percent consistency in all activities and interactions throughout their programming. Whether it is the 10 week, All the Arts Program or their ground breaking First Roots program that works with First Nations youth in the north, DAREarts’ artist educators, teachers and teaching assistants embrace founder Marilyn Fields credo of responsible leadership through action. We live the DARE principles in how we treat each other, how we treat our students and our communities.

DAREarts changes lives and saves lives for youth who come with stories that read like the most incredible fiction only they are all too real. They are often painful, sometimes tragic and always inspiring. When students stand tall at the annual DAREarts leadership awards and tell their stories to a captivated audience, they are stirring, riveting and emotional accounts of their journey from lost, confused, angry youth to motivated, inspired and determined leaders, ready to take the DARE principles out into the world and change it for the better.

DAREarts is possibly the most important youth program running in the country right now. This is no understatement. Too often we throw our troubled youth into a convenient container of hyperbole and bias and assign the blame to society and yet offer no way out. In a world that favors the few, DARE serves the many and brings forth youth leaders that will revolutionize the way we look at youth education through the arts. Visit DAREarts at www.darearts.com and join our team. Make a donation, share our website and help us tell the kids’ story.

Help them change the world.

Glenn Marais

DAREarts Artist-Educator
Music in Mind”

-posted with permission from DAREarts
Read DAREarts’ profile on ArtBridges’ Community-Engaged Arts Directory and Map