The Dance Project

Mission: To teaching students of all ages many different styles of dancing all over lower Michigan and beyond.

The Dance Project was founded in 2008 in an effort to help schools create a safe, fun and positive environment at their dances. After watching a dance at her children’s own high school, Jamie felt that the large groups of students “grinding” on the floors of gymnasiums and cafeterias wasn’t as unavoidable as administrators and faculty seemed to think. She proposed a program to teach teens how to swing dance to popular music through The Dance Project. With help from parents and students in the community, Jamie began to organize public dances for teens where they could dance to their favorite songs, learn steps, turns and dips, and practice the polite way to ask a partner to dance.

Our organization has served in 15 different schools, teaching students swing dancing and encouraging them to show others at their school dances. The Dance Project has fostered the growth of more than 15 swing dancing clubs for students who now meet weekly to dance to popular music all over lower Michigan. Hosting 4 community dances a year, The Dance Project events have attracted students from more than 75 different public, private and home schools in 9 different counties!

The Dance Project has grown from a program targeted specifically to offer solutions to the problems of unstructured “dancing” within local high schools to an organization dedicated to teaching students of all ages many different styles of dancing all over lower Michigan and beyond.

We strive to make these programs easily available to students as well. That means keeping the admission costs down at community dances and being able to provide instruction to schools at affordable rates.