Portland Center Stage’s education programs provide young people with opportunities to experience the art of theater, participate in the process of creating theater, and apply the collaborative principles they learn elsewhere in their daily lives. Recently, three philanthropic leaders in Portland’s business community – Wells Fargo, The PGE Foundation, and the Mentor Graphics Foundation – recognized the importance of these opportunities by awarding a total of $35,000 in grants for our two largest programs: Visions & Voices and Stage Door.

Visions & Voices brings professional teaching artists into public high school classrooms for free, month-long courses in playwriting. Students learn the basic elements of theater and, as a final project, write their own short plays. Each spring a selection of student-written plays are performed by professional actors in free public readings at the Gerding Theater at the Armory. Six Visions & Voices students are also chosen to participate as "Promising Playwrights" in JAW: A Playwrights Festival, where they create new plays that are performed as the festival's kick-off event. For 2015-2016, Visions & Voices is being implemented at a record seven high schools – Barlow, Cleveland, Franklin, Liberty, Lincoln, Sunset and Wilson. This year’s showcase performances are scheduled for May 23 and 24 at 7 p.m. in the Ellyn Bye Studio.

Stage Door is a multifaceted program that began by providing deeply subsidized tickets to PCS productions, including free tickets for Title I schools and nonprofit organizations. It has since expanded to include free pre‐show workshops, resource guides, post‐show Q&As, backstage tours of the Gerding Theater at the Armory, and assistance to schools for bus transportation or substitute teachers. The program also encompasses PCS's All’s Fair in Love & Shakespeare show, which is a lighthearted introduction to the plays of William Shakespeare, designed to adapt to a variety of venues and audiences.

The funding awards PCS received include:

• A $20,000 grant from Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified, community-based financial services company with $1.8 trillion in assets. Founded in 1852 and headquartered in San Francisco, Wells Fargo provides banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance through 8,700 locations, approximately 13,000 ATMs, the internet (wellsfargo.com) and mobile banking, and has offices in 36 countries to support customers who conduct business in the global economy. With approximately 265,000 team members, Wells Fargo serves one in three households in the United States.
• A $10,000 grant from The PGE Foundation, the corporate foundation of Portland General Electric. It was founded in 1997 with an endowment designed to last in perpetuity to improve the quality of life for Oregonians. Since its inception, The PGE Foundation has granted awards totaling more than $18 million across the state to organizations that support what the foundation considers to be the pillars of a vibrant society — education, arts and culture, and healthy families.
• A $5,000 grant from the Mentor Graphics Foundation. Acting as the focal point for the Mentor Graphics Corporation’s outreach, the Foundation funds charitable efforts focused on the communities in which its employees live and work to ensure that they are viable and culturally diverse. Strong viable communities are well educated, have diverse cultural venues and promote the well being of their citizens. To help foster those qualities, the Mentor Graphics Foundation concentrates its charitable giving in three areas: education, culture and the arts, and human health services.

We greatly appreciate the support of these organizations, and our other education funders, which help make it possible for PCS to engage and inspire more than 7,000 young people this year. For more information on our wide array of youth education programs – which also include the PCS Teen Council, Summer Teen Intensives, and job shadow/internships – please email education@pcs.org or call 503-445-3795.