At a time when so many people feel unseen, unheard, or erased, we believe theatre can still be a place to gather, speak, heal, and imagine a different future.

SoCiviC Theatre is a New York–registered nonprofit theatre organization dedicated to social and civic engagement through collaborative, community-centered performance. Based in New York and working across global contexts, we create theatre not only for audiences in seats, but with communities whose stories, struggles, and voices are too often overlooked.

Over the past year, SoCiviC Theatre has already begun this work across multiple communities—especially with three populations we care deeply about:

First, young people in under-resourced public schools.
Many students today are growing up under immense academic pressure, emotional isolation, and systems that ask them to achieve constantly without always asking how they are truly doing. Some are navigating anxiety, depression, burnout, or the quiet loneliness of feeling overwhelmed and unseen. In these spaces, theatre becomes more than an extracurricular activity—it becomes a way to breathe, to speak, to be witnessed, and to rediscover joy, confidence, and connection.

Second, children in small community centers serving migrant families and underserved youth.
In these spaces, resources are often limited, but imagination is urgent. Through theatre workshops, storytelling, and creative play, we bring children opportunities to move, laugh, collaborate, and express themselves—sometimes in ways they have never been invited to before. For children who may not always have stable access to arts education, theatre can become a place of belonging, curiosity, courage, and growth.

Third, ethnic minority and culturally rooted communities whose stories deserve to be told on their own terms.
SoCiviC Theatre is committed to building work that does not simply “represent” communities from the outside, but creates space for people to narrate, reshape, and perform their own histories from within. This includes projects that reimagine canonical works through local memory and lived experience—for example, bringing A Doll’s House back into a Hmong village, radically adapting and rewriting it with Hmong community members, so that the work becomes not a translation of someone else’s story, but a re-authored telling of our own.

This is the heart of our work:
to use theatre as a space for voice, dignity, cultural memory, education, and collective imagination.

And this year, we are bringing that same mission to New York with our newest original production, Farewell, and Erase. This multilingual ethnodrama explores identity, power, workplace absurdity, futurity, erasure, and the question of who gets to decide what remains. Like all of our work, it is rooted in lived experience, cross-cultural storytelling, and the belief that theatre can create public dialogue where silence once lived.

But work like this does not happen on passion alone.

Independent, socially engaged theatre is built in the gap between what communities need and what institutions are willing to fund. It is built by artists, educators, collaborators, and community partners who keep showing up because they believe stories can still change lives. Your support helps us sustain Farewell, and Erase while also making it possible for SoCiviC Theatre to continue and expand the community-based work that defines who we are.

Your donation helps us:

sustain Farewell, and Erase in New York
support rehearsal, production, and artist costs
continue theatre workshops with students in under-resourced public schools
bring creative programming to children in migrant and underserved community centers
develop future community-based projects with ethnic minority and culturally rooted communities
build new cross-cultural theatre work in New York, China, and beyond

When you support SoCiviC Theatre, you are not just funding a performance.
You are helping create spaces where a student under pressure can finally speak.
Where a child can discover joy through storytelling.
Where a community can reclaim its own cultural memory.
Where theatre becomes not a luxury, but a lifeline.

If you believe theatre can do more than entertain—if you believe it can nurture, connect, empower, and help people feel less alone—please support SoCiviC Theatre.

Every gift matters.
And if you’re unable to donate right now, sharing this campaign is also a deeply meaningful act of support.

Thank you for helping us keep this work alive.

Support SoCiviC Theatre