YUVA Arts Project

Our Story

The Yuva Arts Project is an international cross-cultural collaborative initiative aimed at addressing social challenges faced by youths and exploring possible solutions, using arts as a medium of dialogue and expression. I, Tamara Menon, am the founder of this project, in partnership with Prerana, an NGO situated in Kamathipura, Mumbai, and Multicultural Theatre Space, a charity situated in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada.

A group of 6-8 youth from Prerana, between the ages of 14 and 16, who are children of commercially sexually exploited women, will travel to Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada, in May 2019. They will have the opportunity to collaborate in various art-based projects with other marginalized youth in Canada. The main aim is to create inter-cultural awareness of social pressures and discuss possible solutions through a creative artistic cultural exchange, hence allowing them to negotiate their identities and build their artistic and creative abilities through collaboration and performance. The cross-cultural exchanges will lead to acknowledgment and celebration of various perspectives, experiences, and histories, facilitating further awareness of the communities making up Waterloo Region. With this project, we hope that, by creating art in this region and including the youth from Mumbai, the YUVA Arts Project in partnership with MT Space, can move closer to achieving our overlapping vision of “bringing together different communities to create a community of difference” on a global scale, a vision strongly held by MT Space.

Our goal is to give the youth the right guidance, the right opportunities, and the right exposure to discover their full potential towards a positive and enriching future.