City at Peace empowers teenagers to create safe, healthy and peaceful lives and communities. Using the performing arts as a vehicle, City at Peace is developing the next generation of community leaders and believes in a society where teenagers are valued, respected, and play a leading role in creating vibrant communities. This is our seventh successful year in Los Angeles having served teenagers from over 60 schools and all walks of life from the farthest reaches of Los Angeles County. City at Peace is the only national performing arts program for teenagers in the U.S. and the only program for youth combining diversity, conflict resolution, leadership, social change and the arts in a replicable youth-led program.

City at Peace-Los Angles is a dynamic, year-long, youth-led program that works with extremely diverse groups of young people, ages 13 to 19 years old, using an innovative creative process to explore and address the complicated forces and events (e.g. racism, sexual discrimination, abuse, homophobia, violence, drugs, emotional distress) that they encounter on a daily basis. The process helps them to solve their conflicts without violence and to build long lasting relationships, understanding and compassion across racial and cultural boundaries.

City at Peace-Los Angles creates an intense, high-impact, long-term experience for a wide network of youth, in which they learn to master the tools of leadership and to take active responsibility for their communities and in doing so enrich and enhance their lives and others, breaking down boundaries in pursuit of a city at peace.

Rehearsals combine diversity, violence prevention, problem solving and leadership training with the writing, producing, and performing of an original musical based on their lives. Ideas and perspectives generated in workshops provide the raw material that culminate in an original musical written by the youth themselves and based on their lives, identities, experiences and lessons.

Participants also spend much of the year researching, designing, executing, and evaluating community action projects that address their concerns about issues affecting other young people and the communities in which they all live.

Over 400 hours are spent by each participant in the program through the course of the year. After the Spring premier of the original musical, the cast of CP-LA tours their performance to schools, community centers and conferences such as the "By Youth For Youth" Conference hosted by Mar Vista Youth and Families. The cast performs portions of the show and facilitates workshops with the youth, teachers and other guests.