Club Med, the purveyor of all-inclusive beach vacations, doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would inspire too many nonprofit careers. But that’s where it happened for Jenn Cohen, at least in a roundabout way.
Ms. Cohen runs the Circus Project, a Portland, Ore., nonprofit with the dual mission of celebrating circus arts and helping troubled youths.
At 13, Ms. Cohen vacationed with her grandparents at a Club Med in Sandpiper, Fla., where she took a course in the flying trapeze.
“That was it for me,” Ms. Cohen recalls. “I fell in love.”
She worked as a circus performer in Europe, then started teaching at the San Francisco Circus Center. Some of the young people with whom she worked were trying to overcome personal struggles. Ms. Cohen began to draw on their experiences to choreograph works she felt held more meaning. With the goal of mixing the arts and social service, she pursued a master’s degree in process-oriented psychology, an alternative form of psychology that embraces physics, Ttaoism, and other disciplines.
“Circus is exciting and daring, but you have to have really good communication with peers and authority figures,” says Ms. Cohen. “It has a unique appeal to homeless and at-risk youth that other theatrical and athletic paradigms have trouble reaching.”
The Circus Project, which she created in 2008, runs three programs. One is a professional performance troupe, the second offers circus classes to the public, and the third works alongside other nonprofits to serve disadvantaged youths.
Now, for example, Ms. Cohen and her team of coaches are teaching at Bridge Meadows, a community of foster children and their adoptive parents. The parents learn how to instruct their children as the youths perform juggling, hula hooping, and the basics of trapeze, aerial hoops, and other acrobatic exercises.
Taylor Coghill, 20, participated in an intensive class Ms. Cohen ran two years ago for formerly homeless youths. Ms. Coghill and four other teenagers trained five days a week for nine months, paying for their tuition by performing tasks for the charity like asking local businesses for items to auction. The course culminated in a big performance, a fundraiser for the Circus Project.
“It was fabulous,” says Ms. Coghill, who had lived on the street since she was 14. “There’s a moment when after the show, you still have your makeup on, but it’s all smudged, and you’re still wearing your costume, and everyone is telling you how fabulous you are, and that made it all worth it. It’s a moment worth basking in.”
Ms. Coghill says she considered performing professionally. But social work now exerts a stronger pull.
“I plan on going to graduate school and getting a Ph.D. in psychology and writing a couple of books and providing mental-health services to the homeless population,” says Ms. Coghill, who works now as a counselor at Outside In, a homelessness nonprofit, while taking undergraduate classes.
Here, students and their teachers demonstrate their newfound skills. —Caroline Preston
