Maine Inside Out 2025 Annual Report

2025 was a year of prioritizing internal culture, organizational stability, and vibrant, powerful programming. As a staff team, we worked to match our project work and budget decisions to a dramatically changing national and local landscape.

Much of our energy went into developing a new three-year strategy: aligning as a team on MIO’s big picture purpose, crafting updated mission and vision statements, articulating our theory of change, and defining our organizational design for the years ahead. We began by imagining an aspirational strategy, then had to modify it to match the realities of the current fundraising landscape, including the loss of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and other major funders. We came face-to-face with the necessity of operating from a truly realistic budget, and even still, we ended the year with our largest deficit to date.

We communicate this reality alongside our deep commitment to meeting this moment and context with MIO’s practiced methodology, to share a clear eyed perspective on MIO’s current challenges within a big vision, and because, despite the very real funding challenges, our programs had a powerful impact in 2025.

We reignited our relationship with the Maine Department of Corrections, moving us closer to our long-term vision of holding theater workshops in every prison in Maine.

We spent much of the year touring our original play, “Broken Clock,” inside prisons, on college campuses, and in community spaces across the state. We celebrated Juneteenth with a live theater and film event at The Public Theatre in Lewiston, and closed the tour with a big performance at SPACE in Portland. The tour connected a wide range of audiences through dialogue for collective reckoning with mass incarceration in the U.S., using theater as a tool to spark conversation about the hardest things to talk about, the topics that typically divide us. We practiced coming in close, learning how to truly hear and see one another even when we don’t agree. The play and the dialogue that followed it touched on gun violence, on what it means to live inside systems built to respond to crisis rather than prevent it, and on how we come together to support communities that thrive - and hold harm accountable without causing more harm.

This work feels especially urgent in Lewiston, where in 2025 the police department charged 272 juveniles through arrest or summons, part of a surge in youth legal involvement tied to a wave of youth gun violence that intensified through the year. MIO continued to more deeply embed our work in Lewiston, holding open mics and community lunches with MIO’s statewide group of community artists, and continuing theater workshops with Lewiston youth alongside local partner organizations.

In the report that follows, you’ll see the highlights of our work in 2025. We hope you'll feel the sense of what’s possible when a community decides to act together, even (and maybe especially) in a hard year.

Thank you for walking this road with us.

With gratitude,

Chiara Liberatore and Joseph Jackson

Co-Executive Directors, Maine Inside Out

Mission

Maine Inside Out ignites collective creativity and inspires social action by engaging youth and adults impacted by systemic oppression to create and share original theater.

Vision

Maine Inside Out envisions communities and systems that see each person’s humanity, our shared connection, and our place in the natural world. Our vision is to transform a culture of punishment and isolation to one that thrives in connection, dignity, and accountability. 

Values

Maine Inside Out’s values are trust, consistency, creativity, connection, love and purpose. 

Theory of Change

2025 Highlights & Impact

Broken Clock Tour

9 artists, 1 play, 15 performances, 1,800+ audience members
A major highlight of 2025 was the MIO Creative Ensemble’s tour of the original play, “Broken Clock,” inside prisons and in communities across Maine. The play was created and performed by the Creative Ensemble of staff and Lewiston community artists. The tour began in Lewiston in June 2024 and held its finale in Portland in December 2025, engaging more than 1,800 audience members in active dialogue and inspiring social action. The tour used live theater, film, and facilitated dialogue to prompt a collective, heart-centered reckoning with the impacts of mass incarceration. These conversations are opening new possibilities. They’re helping us all see each other more fully and imagine how we can transform harmful systems.

A short documentary film featuring the “Broken Clock” tour was created to premiere in June 2026.

Lewiston Youth Theater Projects

70 youth, 5 community partners, 5 workshops
Our work with Lewiston youth in 2025 was done in close collaboration with community partners who share our belief in the importance of investing in young people. In 2025, partners included Youth-LED Justice, Somali Bantu Community Association, Tree Street Youth, Maine Immigrant & Refugee Services, and Community Organizing Alliance.

Ambiente Project: Theater Workshops for Groups

5 workshops, 125 participants
MIO’s 90-minute interactive workshops offer games and exercises that use theater as a tool for building trust and deepening dialogue. Groups of all sizes are invited to bring in MIO for these workshops. In 2025, MIO held Ambiente workshops at Maine Law, two Portland Housing Authority afterschool program sites, Lewiston-Auburn Senior College, and Waynflete. 

Open Mics

4 open mics, 40+ performers, 200+ attendees
Hosted by Maine Inside Out’s Lewiston leadership group of system-impacted artists, open mics offer a welcoming and supportive space for MIO artists and others from the community who want to share their voices.

Community Lunches

10 community lunches, 40+ participants
MIO’s monthly community lunches brought together system-impacted artists including special guests invited to share lessons learned, welcome people home, and create art together. 

Advocacy & Support

40+ MIO artists supported
MIO offers peer support, personal advocacy, and emergency funds to overcome barriers faced by system-impacted people.

2025 Financials

We experienced a significant loss in 2025 due to federal funding cuts and a corresponding decrease in foundation grants resulting from increased community demand for limited philanthropic funds. MIO was able to cover the deficit with cash reserves.

Thank You!

Deep appreciation for all of the ways the MIO community shows up for this collective work. To our MIO artists, partners, foundation supporters, donors, board members, volunteers, audience members, and larger community of supporters - thank you.

Join Us!

All of our voices are needed to move toward MIO’s vision to transform a culture of punishment and isolation to one that thrives in connection, dignity, and community-led accountability. 

Ways to be involved:

• Join for an upcoming event 

• Host MIO’s theater team for a theater workshop at your organization 

• Reach out to connect with us 

• Share our work with friends and loved ones 

• Make a donation 

• Keep following and supporting our work