See Beautiful 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 page: here.

Fostering beauty from within

"After Camp RYB she has more confidence. Typically, she is very shy but she was so confident at the end of camp presentation. She really shocked me. We played games they learned and listened to camp songs almost all the way home!" -Camp Parent

Realize Your Beauty is so grateful for the opportunity to share our work with the See Beautiful community!

To begin, we’d like to share 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 & 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.

RYB is a 501c3 based in NYC, with program offerings in New York and Colorado.
Our website can be found here: http://realizeyourbeauty.org

“I learned that the beauty is from withIN. I feel the workshop was beneficial because it changed my views on myself.” – Jasemin, age 13, 8th grade

And now for more about our project:

Realize Your Beauty is very excited to be preparing for our annual summer camp! Each 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.

"I loved it! It was the best camp ever!" - Hailey, Camper

The summer camp teaches classic theatre techniques, while also including ‘empowerment’ workshops throughout the day. Our campers learn acting, playwriting & 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. We also have all the fun of a traditional summer camp: drum circles, campfires, swimming, archery, nature walks, crafts, and of course – 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. The pieces they create develop from the conversations we have in the empowerment workshops. The ability to express their feelings with this creative outlet has proven to be a very effective tool for these young people.

To watch a segment from last year’s performance, please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNGS2_1V9Ec&t=74s

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 can, and we have a very extensive scholarship program that provides reduced or free camp tuition for those in need. This summer, 1/2 of our campers will attend on financial assistance.

We believe that we are creating beautiful through our summer camp program by helping our campers fully discover the incredible gifts they have to offer to this world, while at the same time encouraging them to embrace the differences and gifts that others have to offer. We create beautiful by allowing young people to express themselves and their creativity fully and freely. Nurturing this creative energy, kindness and self-respect in our campers allows them to grow and create their own beautiful in this world!

"Lindsay attended last year and absolutely loved Camp RYB! She struggles with self-confidence and fitting in and when she came home last year, she felt like she actually had somewhere she could fit in with a group of girls that weren’t as judgmental and made her feel good about herself. I was so happily surprised by how much Lindsay grew that week of camp and can’t wait to see more growth and confidence after this year. She literally asks all the time if it’s almost time for RYB Camp.” – Camp Parent

Written by: Stacey Lorin Merkl

Founder + Executive Director, Realize Your Beauty