Community engagement is at the heart of what we do; we collaborate with non-professionals in a specific context to create vivid, living theater. The process – sharing story, experience, and expertise across lines of difference – is as vital as the performance. The notion of community itself is a creative question defined anew in each Cornerstone project. Recent collaborating communities include: public housing residents; Indigenous peoples in Los Angeles; veterans and military families; people impacted by the prison system; the LGBTQ+ student community and residents of LA’s port community San Pedro. Upcoming projects engage communities whose neighborhoods have been impacted by the LA fires; the Los Angeles theater community; and citizens, historians, activists and grassroots organizers in LA County. We reach communities and establish authentic engagement by building relationships across time, and rooting those relationships in solidarity, resource sharing, deep listening, collaboration and presence. It takes time to earn just one person’s trust; it takes time to map a creative container for vulnerable collaboration – and we invest the time it takes.

We believe in building community power and centering community voices, with and for low-income and systemically excluded and disinvested communities. Our audiences and co-creators are first-time theatergoers, speakers of non-English languages, elders, children, families, people impacted by the prison system, current and formerly unhoused people. We conceive and develop community collaborations together with a broad range of partners from community service, advocacy and action organizations like Homeboy Industries, Westside Food Bank, MEND, My Tribe Rise, Side Street Projects, Gabrieliño/Tongva Springs Foundation, to public agencies like HACLA (Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles) and Metro.