To inspire dreams, participation, community and excellence through the gift of dance.

Southwest Youth Ballet Theatre Inc. is dedicated to the development and advancement of ballet studen

Source: Nonprofit submitted responses

Goal One: Provide excellence in dance education and to provide as many performance opportunities as possible.

Goal Type: This goal reflects our commitment to further our advocacy work for our organization and or cause area.

Goal Two: Provide unique experiences for our dancers, such as, hiring choreographers so they can learn how the creative process works and hiring a symphony for Nutcracker to learn how to dance with live music.

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

What has gotten in the way of your oganization pursuing this investment?

Our board of directors, including the president, are all volunteers that are professionals (e.g. engineers, marketing, business owners) in the East Valley. Most of our volunteers have full time jobs making it difficult to take part in leadership development opportunities. As college educated professionals, our leaders do self-study when needed.

This organization mobilizes for mission in the following ways:

• Networks of Collective Impact Efforts

• Raising Awareness

• Community Building

What are this organization’s external mobilizaton efforts?

Southwest Youth Ballet Theatre (SWYBT) has several annual programs accomplished in cooperation with other area non-profits, such as our Nutcracker Tea which is held as a joint fundraiser with the Hackett House and Tempe Sister Cities who utilizes youth group and National Charity League volunteers. In addition, the Chandler Symphony Orchestra (CSO) assigns a quartet to support the event. CSO and SWYBT have been performing The Nutcracker together since 2009! Our two non-profits have collaborated on other performances as well. The Nutcracker has been held at Higley Center for the Performing Arts since 2008, but our free to the community end of season performance is mostly been held at Tempe Center for the Arts. This year, with the pandemic, Higley Center was able to support our free to community performance at an affordable rate to help support our give back mission. www.swybt.org, twitter.com/SWYouthBallet, instagram.com/SWYouthBallet, youtube.com/SWYouthBallet, facebook.com/SWYBT

At the beginning of COVID when the building had to shutdown we set up a Zoom account and held ballet classes over Zoom. Our president built portable ballet barre and delivered them to each of the dancers for at home class. We were able to complete Q4 2020 without loss of class time and took the opportunity to expose the dancers to teachers from Ballet Arizona and others including one located in Australia. Over the summer we ran a "Free the Nutcracker" fundraiser where after the goal was reached, we presented one of our 2019 Nutcracker performances on YouTube for a day. We also ran a contactless raffle. We started the 2020-2021 season with lots of safety modifications including hybrid class schedules with some in studio and some on Zoom. The studio was modified to have big screen TVs and iPads for the Zoom participants to learn along with in studio classmates. We modified our Nutcracker by taking only ages 10+, having only one cast, shortening our rehearsal schedule, requiring masks at all times, requiring commitment to our safety contract and performing only 2 shows instead of 4. The theater had capacity limits but offered streaming which we paid for to add to our audience viewing choices. We also performed to recorded music for the first time since 2008 and shortened the show. We fell just a bit short of breaking even, about a $1200 loss. Starting in 2021 we returned to in person classes with masking. To help bridge the gap from our first ever Nutcracker shortfall, we requested donations for our end of season celebration performance, which was still free to attend but donations appreciated. This idea is inline with what our friends at Chandler Symphony do for their shows. We were able to make enough donations to make up for the small shortfall and then some. Along the way we followed AZDHS and CDC guidelines and educated ourselves to keep everyone healthy and have been able to. We also consulted with Working Aware when doctor guidance was helpful.