Ritual4Return Inc.
Location: Lambertville
Website: https://ritual4return.org/
Grant Round: 2025 Round 1
Award: Action / $15,000
Purpose: To support two cohorts of Ritual4Return, a 12-week program through which returning citizens use humanities and theater techniques to process their incarceration and life experiences and take part in a re-welcoming to their communities.
Ritual4Return, Inc. will collaborate with returning citizens in Newark to create homecoming rituals that mark and celebrate their reentry into the community. Through 12-week workshops, two cohorts (women and men) will engage in embodied, arts-based exercises to explore their experiences of incarceration and homecoming. Participants will then devise a homecoming rite of passage, culminating in a public gathering at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. This event will feature the enactment of the rite of passage, dialogues, and a shared celebration, focusing on themes of community, transgression, forgiveness, justice, and homecoming.
Earlier iterations of this project have been supported by an NJCH grant. In addition, R4R was the recipient of NJCH’s 2024 Stanley N. Katz Prize for Excellence in Public Humanities.
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