City at Peace DC uses the performing arts to develop the skills, talents, and confidence of young people to promote cross-cultural understanding, conflict resolution, and violence prevention.

Since 1994, our award-winning youth-led program has worked to build trusting relationships, achieve artistic excellence, and create lasting change in the lives of participants, their families, their schools, and their communities.

Each year, we work intensively with more than 50 teenagers from DC, Maryland, and Virginia who are diverse in every way.  Some have been in gangs and lived on the street.  Some attend private school and others have dropped out of school.  Some are gay.  Some have grown up poor, while others are middle class or rich. Participants are black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and multiracial. They are Muslims, Jews, Christians, and atheists. They are brought together by a desire to tell their stories onstage and by a passion to make peace with themselves and with others.

Led by a production team of returning cast members and assisted by a staff of trained facilitators and seasoned professional artists, each cast works to create, rehearse, and produce an original musical based on their real life experiences. Topics vary from year to year because participants vary, but they often include such issues as racism, sexism, divorce, substance abuse and addiction, relationships, depression, peer pressure, sibling rivalry, domestic violence and sexual abuse, coming out, poverty and social justice.

Participants in City at Peace DC develop meaningful relationships with people from backgrounds they may never have encountered before, shattering stereotypes and creating possibilities. Each year the young people become a community whose members learn to trust each other, feel safe together, hold each other accountable for honesty and integrity in sharing their stories, and work together to create positive change in their lives.