Young Storytellers Foundation

Young Storytellers, formerly the Young Storytellers Foundation, is an arts education non-profit operating primarily in Los Angeles.

Young Storytellers currently serves elementary, middle school, and high school school students in Southern California, including the cities of Los Angeles, Culver City, Santa Monica, and Burbank. YSF targets Title 1 schools; these are schools and school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty in which academic performance tends to be low and the obstacles to raising performance are the greatest. The program improves writing, literacy, and self-confidence.

Young Storytellers began as an in-school mentoring program in 1997 - by three screenwriters Mikkel Bondesen, Brad Falchuk, and Andrew Barrett upon learning about cutbacks in funding for creative arts programs in the Los Angeles public schools. The first school adopted into the program was an elementary school in Culver City. The program was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 2003.

The organization benefits elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. In 2016, 20th Century Fox invited Young Storytellers students to participate in the Fox Writers Intensive.

The Script to Stage program is its main program whereby students in fifth grade write short plays in the course of ten weeks later to be performed by actors on stage. Students in the programs are selected on multiple criteria by teachers and can include students who are not proficient in the English language, have difficulty with reading and writing, or have social assimilation issues. The Script to Stage program produces 900 scripts per year.

The program is run in each school by a volunteer Head Mentor and volunteer Mentors. Each mentor works one-on-one with a student for the duration of the nine-week program to create a screenplay and the resulting screenplay is then performed by a volunteer performer. There are currently over 2,500 volunteers in Los Angeles serving 1,200 students in 60 schools.

The organization received grants from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association multiple times. In 2013 the organization was represented by Olivia Wilde and received a portion of the $1.6 million in grants given by the HFPA that year. 2016 in the amount of $10,000.

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