Uniting Youth and Raising Awareness Through Art

Our Mission: The Diatribe uses performing arts to empower young people to share their stories, raise awareness of social issues, and create change within their communities.

What We Do

Led by a group of nontraditional teaching artists, the Diatribe facilitates after-school programs, assemblies, and creative writing workshops rooted in poetry. By partnering with schools and prominent organizations in West Michigan, we empower students to tackle large societal issues such as fair housing practices, toxic masculinity, and racism while also providing them the space to have conversations surrounding mental health awareness, identity, grief, and loss. We use assemblies to lift students up, show them that they can be transparent and that they can use their story to empower other people. Workshops are a time for students to dissect the different social issues that they and their peers face. Students learn to harness the power of radical vulnerability as they share their stories in a rhetorically compelling way.