Edith Johnson Memorial Trust
The Circus Harmony Showcase and Teacher Training Program is a unique arts education and youth development program. This ongoing project includes the finding, training, and development of youth circus performers from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Children work with professional circus educators, choreographers, and musicians to create acts for public performances and to also learn how to teach the skills they practice.
Circus arts performed and taught include aerial, acrobatic, juggling, comedy, and balancing acts. In the course of a year, students present over 300 shows. In their performances, our young artists display how they have overcome fear, prejudice, and gravity while presenting entertaining, quality circus shows. As they teach, they experience the power of passing it on.
Circus Harmony Showcase and Teacher Training is supported by:
Defy Gravity 101 brings circus classes to local schools and community centers throughout the St. Louis area. Through teaching circus arts, we empower individual children to challenge themselves through appropriate risk taking; increase fitness through improvements in fine motor and visual tracking skills; and cultivate life skills like patience, persistence, focus, and self-confidence while learning to present themselves in public.
Students will foster successful behavior including self-control, self-esteem, conflict resolution, positive thinking, cooperation and leadership skills. They will master fear and expand their life skills. While these students are learning ways to defy gravity, they will also exhibit behavior and abilities that will help them defy low expectations that have been placed on them!
Defy Gravity 101 is supported by:
In 2007, Circus Harmony began Peace Through Pyramids as a collaboration between Circus Harmony’s diverse youth circus troupe, the St. Louis Arches and the Galilee Circus, a Jewish/Arab youth circus from Israel! These ordinary young people have done extraordinary work showing the world what is possible when you focus on what you can do together instead of on what sets you apart. At each meeting, they have produced incredible performances while forging friendships that have stayed strong across oceans and years.
In 2014, we were supposed to be in Israel from July 9-23 but due to the conflict with Gaza and an FAA Flight ban, we were stranded there for an extra week! Within days of our return to St. Louis, the suburb of Ferguson erupted in violence after a white police officer shot and killed an African-American teenager named Michael Brown. With Circus Harmony’s office being in Florissant, we were actually closer to the violence than when we were in Israel.
Circus Harmony believes the path to peace is one of cooperation and communication. Teaching children from different neighborhoods how to stand on each other’s shoulders may seem like a strange way to take this path, but it works for us!
Thanks to a Social Impact grant from the Regional Arts Commission and a PNC project grant from the Arts & Education Council, we started Peace Through Pyramids: Ferguson. The Jewish Federation of St. Louis then granted Saul Mirowitz, a Jewish day school, funding for a collaboration with our students in Ferguson which gave us Peace Through Pyramids: Ferguson/Mirowitz! In fall 2016, we are now embarking on more local Peace Through Pyramids partnerships.
Peace Through Pyramids is supported by:
Of the 600 children we work with each year, over 70% receive some sort of scholarship assistance. Donations after many of our shows and by individuals go into our general Flying Children Scholarship Fund that helps children defy gravity and other limitations put on them by society because of how they look, where they live or some label they have been given.
The Reggie Moore Memorial Scholarship is in honor of one our most motivated students who lost his life in a car crash in 2013. This Scholarship helps other children follow their circus dreams in honor of Reggie. Numerous companies also donate food, bike repair and automotive support.
These scholarships, in kind donations and our general operating expenses are supported by: