Our operations are currently on hold. We hope to continue soon, but there are several obstacles we are currently facing...
Health Challenges
Our founder and director, Steven Brown, has struggled with mysterious debilitating health problems since childhood. Three years ago, he finally received a positive diagnosis of chronic Lyme Disease. He has been undergoing aggressive treatment ever since, and ultimately had to take a step back from working to focus on his health. Doctors are optimistic that they are close to winning this battle, but the timeline remains fluid as chronic Lyme is notoriously difficult to treat. Steven has taken Chrysalis about as far as he can under the current circumstances. He is still able to run Chrysalis from home, and to teach, but there are a couple of obstacles currently preventing Chrysalis from continuing. He would very much like to keep Chrysalis going, and to do so in the Bay Area, but that simply cannot happen if we are not able to find answers to the two issues listed below. As Steven's ability to work has been limited while undergoing treatment, he only has until about the end of the year until he must consider closing Chrysalis and moving to a more affordable area. In the meantime, there are two obstacles that are currently preventing Chrysalis from continuing...
1. Staff Turnover
The original support team that helped Steven to launch Chrysalis have one-by-one moved out of the Bay Area and/or begun new chapters in their lives. While we are excited for them, this has left us with a weakened leadership support team. This is reflective of the greater challenge of life in the Bay Area, where the cost of living continues to increase, making it very difficult for small non-profit programs like ours which do not have a big enough budget to hire full-time employees. We have an incredibly exciting plan to solve this issue, but it cannot be put into action unless we find the right partnership that would allow Chrysalis to continue.
2. Search For The Right Partnership
Valley Church was very generous in hosting our program for five years, but it became clear in half that time that our program might not be a great fit for them. They are very focused on building disciples through instruction in the Bible, whereas we are very focused on using theatre productions to provide personal development and community building. These goals are not mutually exclusive, but what we do is simply not something that Valley feels called to be a part of. We worked with Valley's leadership for two years to see if we could forge a more cohesive partnership, but it ultimately became clear that Chrysalis did not fit into Valley's mission/goals. It's unfortunate that this partnership didn't quite work out as we had hoped for, but we are glad to have gotten clarity and peace in the decision for Chrysalis to move on. We are also very grateful to Valley for hosting our program for so many years, and for their patience and support as we worked through our early growing pains as a new program.
We are now in need of a new partnership. We are hoping to find a church or school or similar organization that will embrace our goal of helping young people to come alive and shine their brightest. Churches do a great job at teaching the Bible and other spiritual things, and we can add to that with our interactive theatre learning experiences that provide personal development and the development of community and a vibrant, thriving culture. We would very much like to be part of a church community that is rooted in truth and dedicated to pursuing joy, love, beauty, etc. We value having this kind of community and spiritual leadership/support as our foundation. These two strong roots are vital to maintaining who we are as a program, and vital to our long-term success.
Our facility needs are fairly flexible and low impact. We typically offer three rehearsals/classes per week, thus far on Mondays and Thursdays after school and on Saturday mornings. We make sure to respect the facilities and leave them each day as we found them or better. We consider the facilities team, church staff, and the greater church community and locals to be a part of our family. We treat them with love and respect accordingly, making sure that our presence and use of the facilities is one that has a positive impact.
NEWS
Our operations are currently on hold as we seek a new partnership, ideally with another local church. In the meantime, our founder and director, Steven Brown, has put Chrysalis operations on hold, as he has been undergoing aggressive treatment for a serious medical condition.
Our operations are currently on hold. We hope to continue soon, but there are several obstacles we are currently facing...
Parting Ways With Valley Church
As you may have heard, our partnership with Valley Church has come to an end. We worked with Valley's leadership for several years to see if we could forge a cohesive partnership, but it ultimately became clear that Chrysalis did not fit into Valley's mission/goals. It's unfortunate that this partnership didn't quite work out as we had hoped for, but we are glad to have gotten clarity and peace in the decision for Chrysalis to move on. We are very grateful to Valley for hosting our program for so many years, and for their patience and support as we worked through our early growing pains as a new program.
Search For The Right Partnership
We are now in need of a new partnership. We have reached out to several churches in the area, but so far we have not found anyone willing to consider partnering or hosting our program. We are hoping to find a church or school or similar organization that will embrace our goal of helping young people to come alive and shine their brightest. Churches do a great job at teaching the Bible and other spiritual things, and our program can complement that perfectly with our interactive theatre learning experiences that provide personal development and the development of a vibrant, thriving culture and community.
We have strongly considered and explored the possibility of Chrysalis operating on its own, but at this moment our program simply is not ready for such a step. Beyond that, we greatly value having the community, spiritual leadership, and support of a church as our foundation. We consider these strong roots to be vital to maintaining who we are as a program, and vital to our long-term sustainable success.
Establishing Roots (or "Growing A Harvest"?)
We have worked hard over the last five years to establish and cultivate healthy seeds that will allow our program to continue to blossom for years to come. Significant prayer, research, discussion, and hard work has gone into identifying and establishing what exactly Chrysalis is. This starts with our website, with our information and registration process, and extends to the experience of your first day at Chrysalis, and right on up to the last day of each production. It's important to us to ensure that every single facet of your experience with us is uniquely identifiable as a "Chrysalis" experience. It includes subtle things, like the content, design, and functionality of the website, as well as things like our teaching methods, the kind of culture we have, the way we tailor every aspect of every experience to be a good fit for the people involved. our priorities in each production, etc.
If you go to Disneyland, you'll notice that every single subtle detail of that experience is carefully crafted by Disney to provide a unique experience that you won't find anywhere else, and that is consistent long-term no matter how much staffing turnover they have. That's what we have been working to establish at Chrysalis. Our entire methodology and philosophy has been carefully developed over time, to ensure that every facet of every experience we offer is a "Chrysalis" experience, to ensure that we can offer something that is sustainable and consistent. We have a ways to go, but we have made tremendous progress.
The biggest puzzle piece that we are currently missing is finding the right location, the right partnerships and people that share our vision and can help it to thrive and blossom into its full potential. Valley Church proved to not be the right field for us to plant in. But if we can find a different church or similar situation that is better suited for Chrysalis, we are confident that the fruits of that harvest will be worth the work. Like so many other things at Chrysalis, it's important that we don't just find "a partnership", or "a team", but the RIGHT partnership, the RIGHT team of people. Doing things the right way takes longer, but it's worth it in the long run. Our program is still young, not yet able to stand on its own, but if planted in the right soil we are confident that it will quickly blossom and grow strong and tall. However, it's important to make sure that the soil we're planting in is the RIGHT soil, that it's soil that will allow us to put down deep, healthy roots. At Valley, we were allowed to grow our small program on their property, like a tree in a nursery. But we were never able to take the tree out of the planter and establish it in the ground.
Our Immediate Future
At the moment, all options are on the table. Hopefully, the right place for Chrysalis is located here in the South Bay somewhere. However, we have to consider every option, and that could include the possibility of moving Chrysalis out of the Bay Area, or even out of California. If the right place is not found, we will have to consider shutting down. We currently have no debt, no commitments, no major ongoing payments, so Chrysalis could always be started up again if the right opportunity presented itself down the road. But for the moment, we'd like to explore our options and see if the right doors open for us to continue without a significant shutdown. We have developed a community of students, parents, teachers/directors, and other supporters who are very important to us. We would like to continue to build on that.
If you would like to see what we were working towards as our potential next phase for Chrysalis, visit www.chrysalisartsministries.org. We were hoping to work in partnership with a church to shape and refine this vision and make it a reality. Whether or not that happens now is very much in question. We had built a relationship with Valley's leadership over the years, but now we would have to start fresh with a new team of people. At the very least, that likely pushes back the timeline on this quite a bit. We would ideally like to enter into a new partnership with an open mind, rather than a fixed course of action.
Meanwhile, we currently have scenery and costumes stored at Valley that will need to be relocated by the end of the school year. We will be looking into finding new homes for the scenery with other theatre programs, and downsizing our costume supply. There is a possibility we will be giving away some of our costumes and props to current/former Chrysalis participants, so make sure to contact us if you're interested in that. We haven't made a list yet of specifically what might be available, but it would generally be very show-specific items like mermaid costumes, which we are unlikely to reuse often (or ever).
Whatever happens, we'd like to thank each and every one of you for your support of Chrysalis over the years!!
If you are interested in helping Chrysalis to continue, please contact Steven at (669) 252-1434 or at info@chrysalisyouththeatre.org
