Founded as a 501c3 nonprofit in 2017, Ridgelines Language Arts provides expert language arts instruction to those who are underserved in the rural ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. We teach language arts—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, queer & trans youth groups, & more.
Ridgelines Language Arts programs offer participants, many of whom are impacted by stigma and injustice, with ways to explore their voices and their stories, exercise their creativity, and advocate for personal wellbeing and social change. We offer these programs because we believe that healthy individuals and just social conditions are sustained by the reflection, honesty, pleasure, and intimacy fostered by the study of language arts.
Our work is four-fold:
We provide expert language arts instruction to those who are impacted by stigma and injustice in our region. Our programs—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—take place in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s rural youth centers, domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, queer & trans youth groups, & more.
We design and publish broadsides, chapbooks, and zines that feature the work of our program participants. We share these publications through exhibitions at local libraries, coffee shops, community centers, store windows, museums, and other gathering spaces.
We create ways for our program participants to share their work through readings, performances, and other community events. We also occasionally host open writing workshops and fundraiser readings to benefit our core programs, and we partner with other organizations in our region to create informal ways for people from all walks of life to enjoy diverse language arts.
We bring the stories, poems, songs, and voices of our program participants to the central PA listening region and beyond through our podcast series, Use Your Words!
"As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action."
--Audre Lorde, "Poetry is Not a Luxury"
UPCOMING EVENTS
Imagination Club Poetry Poster Exhibition
Bellefonte Art Museum
winter/spring 2025
We’re happy to announce that the Bellefonte Art Museum will be exhibiting a rotating selection of colorful poetry posters written by students in Ridgelines’ Imagination Club at the Bellefonte Youth Center over the past two years. Beginning in mid-January, collaborative poems from BYC Imagination Club students will be displayed along the walls leading up to The Makery at the Museum, a dedicated children’s art studio, housed on the second floor of BAM. We hope you'll stop by for a mid-winter poetry pick-me-up!
NEWS
ArtsHERE: A New Grant with Big Impact for 2025-2026
We’re honored to share that Ridgelines was recently named as one of 112 ArtsHERE grant recipients nationwide! This new pilot program from the National Endowment for the Arts aims to strengthen organizations’ capacity for community engagement and boost arts participation for underserved groups and communities across the country. This new funding will help us to significantly invest in professional development for our hardworking corps of Teaching Artists, as well as to recruit and train new teachers, to create new platforms for sharing our students’ work, and to strengthen our leadership team.
Congratulations to all of the grantees across the country! Learn about our fellow grantees at ArtsHERE.org and about the ArtsHERE grant program.
Being Heard poems win first prizes at Grange Fair
We’re very happy to announce that our Being Heard creative writing group won first prize for both of the poems they entered in the Grange Fair senior crafts competition last summer! These entries were a true group effort, with poems written collaboratively by Being Heard members and then illustrated by other talented residents at Centre Care. Pictured above is proud Being Heard teaching artist Abby Minor visiting the prize-winning poems at the Fair.
Ridgelines is supported in 2025 by a $10,000 Challenge America award from the National Endowment for the Arts! We're honored to have recieved this award for the fouth year in a row.
To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
Accessibility Information & Resources:
If there are technologies or services that would make any of our events more accessible for you or someone you know—for example large print materials, audio descriptions, or sign language interpretation—please let us know! You can submit accommodation requests at any time to RidgelinesLanguageArts@gmail.com. We are more than happy to provide these and other services upon request.
Many thanks to our Community Business Sponsors
