This 16-Year-Old Dancer’s Nonprofit Has Gone Global
While the average teenage dance student’s nightly to-do list might include stretching and homework, 16-year-old Nily Samara’s has a healthy dose of number crunching, teaching, and emailing everyone from dancewear manufacturers to journalists to dance-store owners.
Samara is the founder of Ballet Bridges, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to ballet for underserved communities through a two-pronged approach: providing overstock or gently used dancewear to students who don’t have access or resources to purchase it, and giving free classes to those with disabilities and from low-income households.
Samara’s impetus for becoming a nonprofit entrepreneur started close to home in Michigan. The summer before her freshman year of high school, she started teaching ballet to one of her cousins. Soon enough, her cousin’s friends were all over at the house learning the basics, and Samara found a particular joy in watching her cousin, who has a disability. “It just brought her so much confidence,” Samara says, “and it really encouraged me to make something out of this experience.”
As organically as Samara started teaching her family and friends, she expanded into offering classes online or at local gyms to youth with disabilities and from low-income households in her community. She soon formalized the organization as a registered nonprofit in Michigan. While Samara is the driving force behind Ballet Bridges’ vision, operations, and outreach, her parents helped with submitting official forms and opening accounts because she is under 18. They are now working on the nonprofit’s federal 501(c)(3) status.
This year, Samara decided to scale her impact. “ I saw a need to reach dancers around the world,” she says. While Samara recognized that she couldn’t teach globally, she could still help aspiring dancers in remote locations by shipping them much-needed dancewear items. To build her donation supply, Samara works with local dancewear stores to set up donation boxes for gently used and like-new items in their communities. “Families donate outgrown but like-new dancewear, and studios or companies sometimes provide damaged-but-new items or overstock,” Samara explains. To engage a new organization, she often starts with a cold email, first visiting the dance store or brand website, finding contact info, and sending her pictures and story.
When Samara reached out to global dancewear brand Wear Moi, she was pleasantly surprised when they answered her. “We felt the importance of her project,” says Justine Pouzens, the U.S. flagship store’s sales associate. “To us, dance is more than an art form. It’s a community, a family. Everyone deserves the chance to experience the joy, discipline, and freedom that dance brings, regardless of their background or circumstances.”
In matching needs with providers, Samara gets specific. “ There’s one studio in Haiti that reached out to me and said they’re really low on items for boys. And this was a struggle for me, because a lot of my local studios don’t necessarily have too many boys that are dancing and can donate extra items.” Wear Moi stepped in to fill this need, sending Samara tights and other items for male students, along with women’s and kid’s items.
One of Samara’s latest shipments went to Peru. With such a complex operation, she has recruited everyone from her friends at school to her studio classmates to help with packing boxes, creating social media posts, sharing the news, donating items, and teaching classes. “ I think that the tight-knit dance community is always willing to help,” she notes.
Samara says she commits as many hours as necessary to Ballet Bridges each week. “ It’s hard to think about it that way, because it has so much of a role in my life. So it’s constant. I’ll wake up and I’m checking emails and replying to emails. It’s so much outreach, honestly.” Weekends and school breaks offer more time for driving out to partner stores to collect items from their donation boxes, heading to shipping locations, and tracking and weighing dancewear donations.
This summer, Samara is attending intensives at San Francisco Ballet School and The Royal Ballet School. As a rising high school senior who loves academics, she’s thinking of pursuing medicine down the road. But she doesn’t plan to put her dance life on hold, by any means. “ I’ll either join a company at college or start my own company. I’m very creative and I have big aspirations.”
As for Ballet Bridges, she plans for it to keep going, too. In the near term, she’s creating an ambassador program, continuing to spread the word, and soliciting dancewear donations and funding for shipping support. And, of course, she’s planning for the future. “ I’m building a team so that I can continue when I’m in college,” she says. “I think it’s possible—I don’t think I need to bend to what society expects or limits.”
