M3 Program

Overview

Keshet has been teaching dance inside of New Mexico’s pre- and post- adjudication facilities for the past 29 years. Through this work, our M3 Curriculum emerged (M3: Movement + Mentorship = Metamorphosis).

Keshet’s M3 program design uses dance as a vehicle for relationship development, learning self-awareness and self-regulation, clarification and comfort in boundary-setting, a path for leadership development, a space to experience with creative thinking and mistake-making, and a space for empowered choice-making. 

Keshet’s M3 Program has been recognized nationally by the White House, replicated in multiple communities across the country via durational program partnerships, commemorated in the NM Legislature via HM108 (2007), and awarded multiple national awards, honors, and accolades.

Keshet’s teaching faculty of professional dancers and teaching artists facilitate dance classes in juvenile detention facilities across New Mexico.

The M3 program design uses dance as a tool for:

• relationship development,
• learning self-awareness and self-regulation,
• clarification and comfort in boundary-setting,
• a path for leadership development,
• a space to experience creative thinking and mistake-making,
• and a space for empowered choice-making.

History

Keshet’s work in this field began in 1997, and while originally focused specifically on dance education programming with incarcerated youth and young adults, Keshet’s work quickly evolved to use dance as a vehicle to propel juvenile justice legislative policy platforms and broader systems-change.

Over the past 29 years of deep investment in this work, Keshet has built partnerships and collaborations with multiple community and government organizations, working towards meaningful and sustainable systems-change, including the closing of juvenile carceral settings in New Mexico, and increasing community-based and arts-based resources and resource-connectivity.

Locations

Keshet’s teaching faculty of professional dancers and teaching artists facilitates dance classes in juvenile detention facilities across New Mexico, including Bernalillo County’s Youth Services Center (pre-adjudication juvenile detention facility), New Mexico’s Children, Youth, and Families Department’s Youth Diagnostic and Development Center (YDDC) in Albuquerque, NM and the John Paul Taylor Center (JPTC) in Las Cruces, NM (post-adjudication juvenile prison facilities).