Grant Applicant: Realize Your Beauty

The feature below is brought to you by Realize Your Beauty, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about Realize Your Beauty, please visit their website: here. 

​“I learned that you can’t judge a book by its cover but by the details inside. Everyone has the same problems; everyone is unique, original and beautiful. I got to let out my thoughts and experiences in a peaceful fun way. I also got to let everything out to people in a group”. – Raynell, age 14

Realize Your Beauty is so excited for the opportunity to share our work with the See Beautiful community! To begin, we’d love to tell you more about who we are and what we do.

Let’s start with our mission statement:
Realize Your Beauty promotes positive body image to youth through theatre arts. We bring plays, workshops & summer camps to youth to promote self-esteem & kindness.

Our workshops focus on fostering inner beauty- taking the focus away from societal standards and the pressure to be 'pretty'. We encourage students to put their energy into kindness, integrity and respect towards themselves and others and to focus on developing their own unique inner qualities.

For our older students, we also teach eating disorder awareness. Teaching them the signs & symptoms of an eating disorder, and how to reach out for help if they or a friend need support.
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RYB is a 501c3 based in NYC, with program offerings in New York and Colorado.
Our website can be found here: http://realizeyourbeauty.org

The Project
Currently, Realize Your Beauty is hard at work preparing for our summer camps. This summer we are creating more beautiful by helping our campers fully discover the incredible gifts they have to offer to this world! We teach them that they are the most beautiful when they are the most themselves. Encouraging campers to understand that beauty comes from within and helping them to build their confidence allows them to grow and create their own beautiful in this world!
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“Never judge someone based on how they look. Get to know them better and their personality before you say something. I learned you must accept yourself for others to accept you”. – Rabeenah, age 14

More about camp: Every summer we hold Camp Realize Your Beauty- a 5-night summer sleepaway camp at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, Colorado.
The summer camp teaches classic theatre techniques, while also including ‘empowerment’ workshops throughout the day. Our campers learn acting, play writing & directing skills, with a special emphasis placed on developing a positive sense of self. We cover the following topics of ‘empowerment’: self-esteem, kindness (towards self and others) and anti-bullying. Our course also includes tons of traditional camp fun – including nature walks, archery, arts & crafts, fire rings and s’mores! Throughout the week, the campers use their new knowledge and skills to create their own theatre piece, to be performed for parents on the final day of camp, at pick-up time.

“I learned that I don’t have to say bad things about other people. They taught us that we are beautiful how we are, not how we look.” – Eloidy, age 13

The Need
Camp Realize Your Beauty highly values a diverse and inclusive camp. We prioritize making camp a safe and judgment-free zone, and to include campers and counselors of all backgrounds.

Among the ways that Camp RYB focuses on these philosophies is by making sure that campers of all financial backgrounds have access to our programs. For this reason, it is extremely important to us that camp remains affordable and accessible to children of all backgrounds. To that end, we keep our tuition as low as we possibly can and provide discounts and scholarships for those campers in financial need. This summer, 1/3 of our campers will attend camp on reduced tuition.

However, the low tuition means that without support, it’s very difficult for us to meet our expenses. This summer is no exception, and Realize Your Beauty is in urgent need of support to bridge the gap between our summer camp expenses and the income we will receive from campers.
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With support, our summer camp can grow and thrive, and we can encourage a whole new generation to create beautiful in this world!

We’re very grateful to See Beautiful for the opportunity to share our story!
To learn more about our programs, please visit our website: realizeyourbeauty.org

“I am now working towards being fully confident in my own skin & have tips on how to do it in the right way.” – Danielle, age 12

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Written by Stacey Lorin Merkl, Founder and Executive Directory of Realize Your Beauty

Edited by Rachel McLeroy for See Beautiful