Community Impact Lab

Creativity. Equity. Impact.

Powered by theater. Rooted in relationship.

Turn your theater practice into a

force for community change

The Community Impact Lab, developed by Out of Hand Theater, helps theater organizations create powerful, local projects that move people from awareness ➔ to connection ➔ to action.

You’ll learn how to build shared spaces where stories invite courage, dialogue builds bridges, and change doesn’t feel pushed—but possible.

This is for people who want to do more than produce theater. It’s for those who want to host transformation.

This isn’t just training.
It’s an artist-led framework for real, embodied impact in your community.

You’ll walk away with:

  • A full Equitable Dinners program, ready to lead in your community

  • Facilitation and creative tools that build trust, connection, and belonging

  • A team within your org aligned around a shared purpose and practice

  • Up to 5 hours of personalized consulting from Out of Hand Theater

  • A network of fellow artist-leaders walking the same courageous path

This isn’t just professional development… it’s a creative re-alignment, from performing at audiences to building with communities.

You’ll fit right in if you’re a…

  • Director or producer who wants your work to create more than applause

  • Teaching artist or facilitator craving more depth, connection, and impact

  • Equity lead or changemaker tired of surface-level DEI and ready to embody the work

  • Theater org looking to grow your community partnerships and creative mission

If you’re ready to stop checking boxes and start cultivating something lasting—this is for you.

How the community impact lab works

Program Snapshot

Two-Day Launch Immersion
Kick off with embodied leadership practices + creative frameworks for civic change

7 Monthly Modules
One weekday (12–4pm) + one evening (6–8pm) per month
Each one builds real skills: from cultural fluency and systems-thinking to container-building and creative alignment

Capstone Project
You lead your own Equitable Dinner—a story + dialogue experience grounded in local issues

Ongoing Support
Get up to 5 hours of personalized consulting + a national cohort of peers.

What you’ll learn

  • Each module includes tools, templates, and live practice sessions.

    This work is not about perfection—it’s about practice, presence, and showing up differently.

  • This session introduces Appreciative Inquiry as a paradigm shift—a way to flip the lens from deficit to possibility, from what's broken to what's alive. You’ll explore how focusing on strengths, shared values, and untapped capacity opens pathways to sustainable change.

    Rather than pushing people to transform, you’ll learn to invite them into vision—and build alignment from that generative place.

    You’ll leave with tools to:

    • Facilitate strengths-based conversations

    • Reframe resistance as creative tension

    Engage communities with curiosity and respect

  • Theater isn’t just storytelling—it’s system disruption through embodiment.

    This session grounds you in the Equitable Dinners framework, showing how performance and facilitated dialogue combine to spark insight, empathy, and social action. You’ll learn to design high-impact, community-based events that move beyond audience consumption into co-creation and engagement.

    This is the heartbeat of the Lab: a blueprint for artistic civic practice.

    You’ll leave with tools to:

    • Craft community-driven theater experiences

    • Facilitate meaningful dialogue across difference

    Use the Equitable Dinners model as a flexible platform for local change.

  • Cultural competency is not a checklist—it’s a lifelong mirror.

    This session begins within: how do your lived experiences, identities, and cultural lenses shape how you lead, perceive, and relate? By slowing down and reflecting honestly, you’ll expand your capacity to connect authentically and lead inclusively.

    This module helps shift diversity work from an abstract ideal to a felt, embodied practice.

    You’ll leave with tools to:

    • Identify and reflect on your cultural filters

    • Navigate cross-cultural dynamics with humility

    Build relationships rooted in empathy and respect

  • To disrupt a system, you must first see it clearly.

    This session builds your understanding of how structural inequity is formed, maintained, and normalized—especially within cultural institutions. You’ll explore the histories and policies that shape our current reality, and begin to identify where you hold power to intervene.

    This is not about blame—it’s about building a shared vocabulary for transformation.

    You’ll leave with tools to:

    • Map how inequity operates in systems, language, and space

    • Facilitate equity-based learning conversations

    Connect historic injustice to current creative practice

  • Equity is not just a principle—it’s a practice architecture.

    This session moves from fluency to implementation. You’ll learn how to apply an equity lens to programming, partnerships, and leadership decisions. With real-world examples and peer collaboration, you’ll begin designing practices that hold equity as a structural priority, not a performative afterthought.

    You’ll leave with tools to:

    • Integrate equity goals into your projects and processes

    • Co-create accountability frameworks with community partners

    Sustain long-term cultural shifts, not one-time events

  • True transformation doesn’t need to be forced. It needs to be held.

    This session reveals the deep skill of designing growth containers—environments where vulnerability, learning, and emergence can occur. You’ll explore the principles of transformational facilitation: how to create structure without control, and trust the process without collapsing into chaos.

    This is about becoming a steward of change, not its engineer.

    You’ll leave with tools to:

    • Design emotionally intelligent spaces for dialogue and growth

    • Hold space for discomfort, silence, and revelation

    Facilitate experiences that move from insight to integration

  • Leadership that lacks soul becomes strategy. This session brings you home to your creative source.

    Reconnect with your deepest "why"—the personal vision that underlies your work and impact. You’ll explore your gifts, story, and voice in a new light, and map how to align your purpose with the systems you're helping to transform.

    This isn’t about self-expression.
    It’s about soul-aligned contribution.

    You’ll leave with tools to:

    • Articulate your leadership vision in clear, creative language

    • Align your artistic practice with your equity purpose

    Sustain your work from a place of integrity and inner clarity

  • Evening explorations for those ready to meet the deeper currents—where equity becomes embodiment.

  • Decenter the dominant narrative.
    Unpack how white-dominant norms shape arts institutions and begin the work of rebalancing voice, power, and authorship.

  • Not just anti-bias—liberation.
    Understand how racism functions across structures and psyches. Begin to develop daily, relational, and institutional practices that move from harm to healing.

  • Words are spells. Stories are systems.
    Explore how language shapes culture—and how precise, conscious speech can become a tool for truth-telling and transformation.

Why it matters

You don’t need to do more.
You need to do differently.

Community Impact Lab gives you the structure, support, and creative spark to:

  • Build trust with your community through shared stories

  • Use theater as a living civic tool, not just a mirror

  • Center equity not as an add-on—but as a way of being

  • Lead projects that create room for people to feel, shift, and act

This is the kind of work that changes people.
This is the kind of work that changes you.

Ready to join?

We’re gathering a cohort of bold, curious, justice-driven creatives who believe art can do more than reflect the world—it can reimagine it.

Let’s stop producing change and start cultivating it.
Let’s host spaces where transformation can take root.

One story. One conversation. One community at a time.