Last August, 24-year-old Jess Coshatt was homeless, living alone in the woods outside Portland, Ore.
Now she has an apartment, is looking for a job and wants to rejoin society. So what happened?
Quite simply, she climbed a trapeze.
Coshatt heard about drop-in circus classes while she was eating at a local shelter. She stumbled into The Circus Project, a local organization that also offers public classes, a training program and a performance troupe, and found a reason to change her life. “The Circus Project has been the turning point. It gave me a sense of hope and purpose and wonder again. It made me realize that there are people worth hanging out with. There are reasons for me to go out and do things,” Coshatt explained. “I’ve turned everything around in a matter of months. I quit drinking. I’m quitting smoking. I mostly switched from coffee to tea. I started taking yoga.”
It’s impossible to overstate the effect that The Circus Project has had on her life. In the coming weeks, she will audition for a spot in the organization’s intensive training program, which requires a commitment of at least 10 hours of training each week for a year.
Her kind of story is the reason The Circus Project exists, according to founder Jenn Cohen. Years ago, after training and performing as an aerialist around the world, Cohen, now 34, started coaching at-risk students in San Francisco. That role inspired her to return to school to earn her master’s degree in social work — “always with the idea of bringing it back to circus.” The Circus Project started as her master’s thesis.
In 2008, The Circus Project opened its doors in Portland. Since then, more than 200 people have tried the circus life on for size. A large part of the project’s mission remains instilling confidence in at-risk youth from 12 to 24 who stream in from partner organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Club, or after hearing Cohen speak at their hangouts.
Young people who take a liking to the acrobatics, as Coshatt has, find confidence and new friends that give them incentive to transition out of homelessness. If they enter the training program, they take on the commitment of showing up to practice and doing work-study to pay their way. And they do it joyfully.
Coshatt says, “My body is this thing that I always felt trapped in, but through The Circus Project I’ve learned a new freedom with my body.” She was always scared of heights, she said, and now she can make it to the top of the 25-foot-tall silk rope. “When I’m on the trapeze it’s the place where all my scattered pieces come together. It’s the meeting place of body, mind and spirit.”
Aaron Guerrero wasn’t homeless when he joined the training program two years ago, but The Circus Project has changed his life as well. He heard about it at a gay youth center where he hung out, but dismissed it because he wasn’t flexible. Finally, with pressure from center staff, he caved. He didn’t take to stilts or juggling, “but the minute I touched the trapeze I instantly fell in love,” he said.
Now, he says, “I owe a big part of who I am to The Circus Project. Before I came here I had just turned 21. I was either going out or drinking at home all the time. It was a really unstable lifestyle. Now I take much better care of my body.”
While the rest of the training corps has moved on — including one who’s teaching circus work and one at a professional circus school in Europe — Guerrero, 23, keeps coming back. “I stayed because I liked the person who I was becoming,” he said. By day, he works at an insurance company. By night, he perfects his signature move, falling backwards on the trapeze and catching his ankles.
Cohen’s idea seems to be catching on. “This has become a term now — ‘social circus,’” she said, pointing to similar organizations, such as Circus Harmony in St. Louis. The brand-name Cirque du Soleil is even one of The Circus Project’s funders. “People all over the world are recognizing the powerful effects this has on marginalized populations.”
Photos courtesy of The Circus Project.