Drama Club Inc

Established in Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brownsville Brooklyn in 2013, Drama Club’s mission is to consistently care for youth who are incarcerated and justice-involved by providing space for them to thrive, using improv as their guide. 

Since 2013, Drama Club has shown up every week — inside Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brooklyn, at the Passages Academy in Crossroads, and Belmont Academy in East New York Brooklyn. In 2014, we expanded to Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx, Robert N. Davoren Center at Rikers Island, and Rose M. Singer Center at Rikers Island — bringing a creative sanctuary into some of the most challenging environments a young person can face. In 2017, we expanded our reach in partnership with The Door in Manhattan to serve youth in reentry. Drama Club has recently expanded into the preventative space and will soon be launching programming at Brooklyn High Schools in the neighborhoods where a concentration of incarcerated youth live. 

Drama Club provides 16+ hours of weekly, free, year-round, theater-based programming to incarcerated and court-involved youth in NYC. We support over 900 youth annually through in-facility residencies and our paid, multi-year reentry Apprentice Program. Last year 4 of our Brooklyn based Apprentices were served a combined 834 hours of developmental workshops and one-on-on engagement with Teaching Artist Mentors and MSW Interns. Our trauma-informed, SEL-driven curriculum fosters leadership and artistic voice, empowering youth to thrive through creativity, and consistent mentorship.

July 2025 through June 2026, Drama Club delivered 398 workshops culminating in 9 performances with audiences of over 400. We have maintained an unbroken record of zero incidents of violence during our classes since the day we began. Our Apprentice recidivism rate is 1%, far below the national average of 25% for justice involved youth.