Arts Education International is a 501(c)3 non profit organization committed to providing sustainable, community-based arts programs for orphaned, abandoned and traumatized children all over the world. We currently have five programs in Ghana and Sierra Leone serving over 600 children, and will soon be expanding domestically. We hire indigenous artists, musicians, dancers and dramatists to teach workshops for the kids. The children we serve have grown up under the most harrowing of circumstances. Some were orphaned as a result of the AIDS epidemic, while others were forced into combat as child soldiers in a brutal, 11-year civil war.