January 29, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Paul Miller has an unusual idea about how to instill self-confidence in young people. He challenges them to juggle knives and flaming sticks and to walk a tightrope.
Mr. Miller, who once worked as a clown at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, says all kids need “a chance to succeed and fail and try again.”
With that goal in mind, Mr. Miller founded CircEsteem in Chicago in 2001, a nonprofit group that teaches circus arts to young people ages 6 to 17.
Mr. Miller estimates that CircEsteem trains 300 to 400 children per week, both in schools and after school at community centers.
The organization focuses most of its attention on 40 to 50 kids who every week go to the group’s headquarters at Alternatives, a youth and family social-services organization in Chicago, to be trained and then perform and travel across the United States and around the world.
Children from both affluent and poor families participate in the program.
Because CircEsteem is located in a diverse neighborhood in Chicago, Mr. Miller says, the group attracts a high percentage of children who were born outside the United States.
“You literally have kids from the Congo to kids from the Gold Coast, which is the exclusive neighborhood in Chicago, and they’re all working hand in hand,” he says. “It’s a great equalizer, because it doesn’t matter if you have a cellphone or what car you came in. It’s really what you can do: juggling and standing on each other to do acrobatics and the clowning routine that we work on. Everybody’s on the same page.”
Mr. Miller also started a tutoring and college-scholarship program for youths in the group. And he hires talented teenagers who are alumni to lead classes, and CircEsteem holds a summer camp each year.
The group’s budget in 2008 was $650,000. Mr. Miller estimates that half of that came from fees for classes and performances. Another quarter came from money donated by individuals, 20 percent from foundations, and about 5 percent from governments.
Here, a youngster from CircEsteem performs on a gym wheel for an audience in Frankfurt.
