Marriage Equality Happened, But LGBTQ Youth Still Face Acceptance Struggles. Not Here

At least four days a week, Qing, a 24-year-old black gay man, buzzes into an unassuming, century-old high-rise near New York University in lower Manhattan. Squished between an upscale fitness center and a Lebanese eatery, the building’s double glass doors are blank. Its dimly lit hallway appears to lead to a freight elevator. The only clue to what’s inside is a modest sign over the entrance, identifying it as “The Hetrick-Martin Institute.”
When the elevator doors open onto the third floor, the building’s drab exterior falls away like Dorothy’s first Technicolor step into Oz. Here, at the Institute (or HMI, for short), the walls are splashed with rainbow murals, a pointed reference to its work helping New York City’s gay youth. Qing comes here to work on his freelance fashion designs, eat a hot dinner at its cafe and participate in group discussions like “In the Clear” on Tuesdays, where homeless youth share tips on steering clear of rain and snow, or “Neutral Grounds” on Thursday, which focuses on HIV (for kids both positive and negative) and the stigma surrounding the disease.
“Most of the time, if I need a safe space to go to, a place to digress, just to feel cared for and loved, I will always come to HMI,” he tells NationSwell, sitting in a classroom at HMI.

Qing’s main interest is in fashion design, but he comes to the Hetrick-Martin Institute to take advantage of its various resources.

The son of a“deadbeat dad” that was in and out of prison and didn’t “want to change or help himself,” Qing (who asked that his last name not be used), grew up in rough part of the Washington, D.C., area, with his mother and sisters. Homeless for a five-year period, Qing drifted through eight different schools by the time he reached eighth grade. “Sometimes I feel like I’m destined to be like my dad,” he worries before adding, “I use my past as my motivation.”
Qing left his family in Virginia to pursue his fashion and design dreams in the Big Apple. As a child, he escaped life’s commotion by sewing or sketching outfits. “I want to have my own fashion house one day,” he says. “They have an open studio [at HMI], which I can’t find anywhere else. The space, the materials, the proper tools are there to use: my mannequins, fabric, pattern paper.” Recently, he painted, glittered and bedazzled a shoe to turn it into a flower pot. He shipped it home as a gift for his mom.
“Here at HMI, I actually learned how I am more, how I want to be. I came to understand that I live in color and that I don’t have this monotone life, I guess. We always learn to walk in your truth. I practice that every day — being more authentic — like myself all the time,” he says. When visiting certain New York City neighborhoods, like Harlem, people would stare at Qing. “Now, they respond differently. If you show that you respect yourself and love yourself, they will treat you the same way.”
Bathrooms outside of HMI’s counseling center. HMI creates a safe and supportive environment in which LGBTQ youth, ages 13 to 24, can reach their full potential.

The Hetrick-Martin Institute was founded in 1979 when Dr. Emery Hetrick, a psychiatrist, and his partner, NYU professor Dr. Damien Martin, heard about a 15-year-old runaway who was beaten and tossed out of a group home because of his sexuality. Outraged, they mobilized advocates and welcomed LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) youth into their West Village living room. (The organization, formerly the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, was renamed in their honor when both died from AIDS.)
“It was a very different planet. This was a time when ‘homosexuality’ was in the same paragraph as mental retardation in the [American Medical Association] Journal,” says Thomas Krever, HMI’s CEO, a native New Yorker who previously ran gang intervention programs in Brooklyn and knows firsthand what it’s like to be young and gay. He praises recent significant gains, but acknowledges that homosexuals are still a long way from equality. (For instance, you can read national headlines about a judge in Utah who took a 1-year-old girl away from her lesbian foster mothers, how Houston voters rejected an ordinance protecting gays from discrimination or the latest on Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who became a poster child for Christian conservatives for denying marriage licenses to gays. Even in the liberal mecca of New York City, slurs are hurled at same-sex couples walking in Central Park.) And as Krever points out, “I can get married on Sunday and fired on Monday in more states than not.”
Lockers decorated by HMI participants. The Institute is open six days a week for a hot meal, counseling, art classes, clothing, toiletries and other services and needs.

HMI has sometimes been pigeonholed as an after-school program for gay youth, but Krever articulates a much more comprehensive vision, inspired by Hetrick and Martin’s initial outreach. At its location on Astor Place, which it co-inhabits with Harvey Milk High School, a public transfer school for kids who were bullied at other schools, HMI wants to create a safe space for 13- to 24-years-olds to be who they are, “where they can get information that is accurate, maybe meet somebody that looks like themselves and has a similar history and experience the rites of passage that this population doesn’t have,” Krever says. (“I know for myself, at high school prom, I was dancing with my [female] date but staring longingly at the boy I had a crush on,” he says.) “It doesn’t mean teaching them fear and how to deny who they are, but how to navigate a system that is not tolerant and accepting,” Krever adds. Through discussion groups, career readiness classes, health programs, academic enrichment and extracurriculars, HMI encourages the 2,000 youth who come through their doors annually to thrive. In the process, it may also shift the opinions of hundreds of thousands of others who witness the teenagers’ successes.
The pantry at HMI offers free clothing, toiletries, condoms, and laundry facilities to any visiting young person.

Like the wraparound model at Harlem Children’s Zone, HMI focuses its work on the young person as a whole, addressing homelessness, substance use and risky sexual behavior as symptoms of underlying trauma, rather than as isolated problems. Five counselors provide rigorous therapy for LGBTQ kids who are struggling with their sense of self or are frustrated by feelings of repression and a thwarted desire for certain social interactions.
“Through those double doors in the counseling wing, you have young people that are literally in crisis, with therapists and social workers who are getting at complex trauma and a history of mental health issues,” says Rofofsky.
A typical session might start with a young person revealing his desire to come out to his parents. A counselor will respond, “How about the goal is not whether you’re going to come out or not, but why don’t we explore all the areas in your life that could be safe or unsafe?” As the conversation unfolds, they might explore the details of what coming out would look like at home, in the neighborhood and in the classroom. Often, the teenager may indicate other issues. Worries about a parent getting physically violent upon the revelation of their sexuality, for instance, might lead to more sessions about any underlying childhood abuse.
Kahdija, 21, works on a painting with one of the teaching artists at HMI.

Some discussions happen in a group setting, like the ones that Qing attends, or through an art therapy class, which 21-year-old Kahdija, a straight ally from Brooklyn, enjoys. Kahdija first heard about HMI from her older sister, who came out as bisexual. She was scared and unsure of what to expect when she first took the elevator up, but she walked in and found a lot of “very flamboyant” guys all dancing. “I’m here everyday, even on Saturday,” she says. “Yesterday, I stayed at school to finish up work and I kept looking up at the clock to see if I had time to make it to HMI.” When NationSwell visited HMI, Kahdija was finishing up a painting of a snake, refining the colors so that the reptile’s skin was dark with shade in all the right places.
Kahdija says participating in discussions has already changed her viewpoints. A few blocks from where she lives in Flatbush, she once saw a transgender woman harassed by a man yelling obscenities. Kahdija, across the street, watched in horror, but remained silent. After spending time at HMI, she’s now ashamed by her inaction. If she were faced with the same scenario today, she says she’d tell the guys off and suggest the woman go inside where she’d be safe.
Kahdija shows off her painting of her pet snake, which she worked on for several weeks at HMI.

It’s precisely that kind of leadership and understanding of the challenges faced by LGBTQ youth that Krever wants to see. He still vividly remembers his first months on the job in 2003, when members of the Westboro Baptist Church (who hold the infamous “God Hates Fags” signs) planned a protest outside the Institute’s doors to mark the start of the school year. Exiting the nearby subway station, Krever heard a roar and his stomach dropped in fear. He turned the corner to discover that the noise came from more than 500 supporters who had made a human chain to allow safe passage for the kids. “It’s how I knew I was at the right place and at the right time,” he recounts tearfully in his office. “I long for the day when it’s not a big deal when another CEO says he’s gay,” Krever says. Today’s not that day, but with HMI’s work, it can’t be far off.

These Beautiful Art Projects Saved One Rust Belt Community from Economic Ruin

Construction projects wreak havoc on everyone’s lives. Residents become sleep deprived when the jackhammers wake them each morning, and commuters stress about detours adding minutes to their daily travel. But local business owners may suffer the most harm, as merchants on Manhattan’s Upper East Side near the Second Avenue subway construction and West Los Angeles storeowners coping with the new light-rail extension cutting through town can attest. Noise and dust drives away customers and businesses lose millions as a result.
When a year-long, $5.5 million repaving project threatened Cleveland’s now-thriving Collinwood neighborhood near Lake Erie, one civic group came up with a solution. Northeast Shores, a community development corporation, asked 225 artists to beautify the half-mile under construction with 52 community art projects. Funded by a relatively modest $118,000 grant, the initiative helped keep all 33 participating merchants in business.
“It’s pretty typical in Cleveland that a streetscape project results in business loss,” Brian Friedman, executive director at Northeast Shores, tells the blog Springboard Exchange. “People decide not to come thanks to the orange barrels.”

Mac’s Lock Shop on Waterloo Road.

Ravaged by the decline of the city’s manufacturing industry and the onset of another recession, vacancies used to dominate Cleveland’s central thoroughfare, Waterloo Road, and more stores were boarded up than occupied. By 2013, however, a new generation of small businesses was reviving the neighborhood, but infrastructure improvements needed to catch up.
To create a distraction amidst the chaos, Northeast Shores drew inspiration from a similar arts project in Saint Paul, Minn. The development agency offered small monthly grants, made available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Storeowners instantly crowded outside their offices, clamoring to get in.
“We were a little distressed by the number of merchants who were literally waiting for us to open so they could shove paper at us seconds apart from each other, to make sure they could be included,” Friedman recalls. “We didn’t think it was a good community-building moment for us to have merchants sitting in front of our office at 5 o’clock in the morning, arguing with each other about who got there first.”
With a streamlined application process, projects soon got underway. Mac’s Lock Shop, for instance, helped sculptor Ali Lukacsy put up luggage locks stamped with individual messages (Locks of Love) on fences. Storefronts and open spaces filled with crafts.
Not only were beautiful surprises scattered throughout 10 city blocks, but the venture also helped to solidify lasting partnerships and sparked community involvement from artists who could’ve hunkered down in their studios until the streets were clean. Creative businesses — art galleries, performance spaces, fabric stores and design agencies — proliferated, and now, Waterloo Road is considered the city’s hotbed of arts and entertainment.
A detail of the Locks of Love installation.

That strong civic fabric will be vital as Cleveland shifts its image from Rust Belt holdover (derided as “The Mistake on the Lake”) to an attractive destination for Millennials (with a new nickname of “The Comeback City”). “I want Waterloo to be a mini Austin or Nashville,” Cindy Barber, co-owner of Beachland Ballroom, a longstanding live music venue on Waterloo Road, tells the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. “We have to dream big to expand what we’ve been doing here to get people to Waterloo.”
The artwork gets visitors to stop and look. From there, closing the deal should be the easy part.

Does the Pen Have the Might to Help At-Risk Teens?

We all have stories to tell, but for these students, telling it may be the key to their success.
Spoken in rhyme, Get Lit presents teen with opportunity to express their frustration, joy and thoughts on life through poetry. By entering the lyrical world, these students are able to verbalize and escape the trials of everyday life and envision a different future.
It all began back in 2006 when teacher and literary coach Dian Luby Lane started the program in a South Central Los Angeles high school. Coming from a low-income community herself, Lane wanted to show her students that there is a hope for a better future. So she introduced them to the world that saved her: books and poetry.
Since then, Get Lit has expanded to other schools and communities in order to show at-risk teens that there is hope. Through curriculums taught at high schools and in communities, Get Lit uses poetry to instill confidence and show the value of self-expression. Students who participate learn not only to read poetry, but also to write and perform it, reports Good.
The curriculum includes classical, spoken word and canonical poems from Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound to Langston Hughes.
Get Lit is more than just a class, though. It’s also a traveling troupe of performers known as the Get Lit Players, which performs famous compositions, as well as originals. During their travels last November, the Get Lit Players found themselves on The Queen Latifah Show where a video of their performance went viral.

One member of the troupe is 18-year-old Kyland Turner, a senior with aspirations to work in television and movies.
“[Get Lit] came to my school and someone did a poem about a father son relationship and it spoke to me and my struggles so I decided to get involved,” Turner tells The Queen Latifah Show. “Since joining Get Lit I have turned my grades around and now I’m looking and applying to colleges, something I never thought I would have a chance at doing two years ago. They saved me in so many ways; I owe my life to Get Lit.”
Currently, Get Lit has a pilot program in Washington, D.C., and it’s also working in coordination with After School All-Stars, a program offering after-school programs to almost 90,000 students. The organization is currently holding a fundraising campaign with the hope of further expansion.
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Forget Calculus and Gym Class. At This High School, Students Are Trained for Workplace Success

What is the purpose of high school?
At Camden County High School (CCHS) in Georgia, the school employs a “career technical” approach: using various academies aimed at different career fields to create a pre-professional, engaging environment for its almost 2,800 students.
All freshman are enrolled in the Freshman Academy, where they’re introduced to the curriculum and get acclimated to the school, as well as take most of the traditional academic core. From there, students pick one of the five career academies to enroll in, where they receive first-hand experience from people in that respective field, reports the Atlantic.
In the Government and Public Services Academy, students can follow the law and justice curriculum and take a class with Navy-Kings Bay NCIS official Rich Gamble. In Gamble’s class, students are trained in appropriate investigative procedures and court room preparation.
For those students looking for more technical work, there’s the Engineering and Industrial Technology Academy. This field includes a wide variety of careers, but CCHS covers many, including woodwork, welding, auto-repair, electrical work, computer-aided design and robotics program. Learning doesn’t just take place in the classroom; students actually sell products and perform services for the community, too.
Within the Health and Environmental Sciences Academy, students interested in the medical field can bring textbooks to life as they diagnose and care for dummies. The models are also used as test prep for certification exams.
There’s also a Fine Arts Academy (which covers all facets from theater to cooking) and one for Business and Marketing, where students learn the keys to success in the corporate world.
At CCHS, students are shown that there’s more to high school than just surviving class: a thriving career.
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This Veteran Helps Fellow Soldiers Tap into Their Artistic Sides

It’s an understatement to say that Army veteran BR McDonald is multi-talented.
McDonald always dreamed of becoming a musician or an actor, but after the terror attacks on September 11, he decided to enlist in the military.
Growing up, McDonald’s parents were missionaries in Taiwan, so he was fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Perhaps because of this, the Army assigned McDonald (who graduated from the University of North Carolina in 2001 with degrees in vocal performance and religious studies) the task of learning Arabic. Graduating from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., at the top of his class, McDonald served as a linguist with the Joint Special Operations Command.
McDonald tells the Christian Science Monitor, “There are a lot of people in the intelligence community with a creative background. It’s the same side of the brain. Music is just another language. So when I heard something I could repeat it.”
In 2008, he felt a call to reengage with the art world and was determined to bring fellow vets along with him. So the following year, he founded the Veteran Artist Program (VAP). Its goal? To support veterans who wanted to start careers in the arts.
VAP sponsors events such as art shows, theater productions and writing workshops across the country. It also teaches veterans how to make a living as artists by connecting them to mentors, opportunities and grants. For example, in 2011 through Operation: Oliver, volunteers with VAP and other organizations cleared almost 60 tons of garbage from a low-income neighborhood in Baltimore and painted a bright, kid-friendly mural.
“A lot of people only see art as a means of therapy for veterans. That’s not what VAP is about, although we do work with art as healing,” McDonald says. “People have to understand that these are artists who happen to be veterans. The two are not mutually exclusive.”
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Gentrification Doesn’t Have to Drive Out a Neighborhood’s Original Residents

As poorer neighborhoods become upscale and hip through gentrification, the residents — often artists — who have made the place what it is often get lost in the shuffle.
But in East Harlem’s El Barrio neighborhood, the nonprofit Artspace is making a home for the neighborhood’s artistic innovators in an old elementary school.
Without the desks, chairs and chalkboards, PS 109 is now offering high quality apartments for cheap prices for artists. So far, 53,000 people have applied for the 89 available apartments, and the first tenants moved in at the end of December, according to Fast Company.  With studios renting for $494 a month and two-bedrooms for $1,022 a month, PS 109 is trying to ensure the survival of Harlem’s artists.
This isn’t Artspace’s first project; it actually has 35 years of experience developing affordable housing options for artists across the country. Started in Minneapolis, the organization’s mission is to keep creative types in their neighborhoods and prevent them from being displaced by the gentrification they helped bring about.
While Artspace’s goal is to provide housing for all artists, it’s particularly interested in providing housing for neighborhood artists, which is why at least half of the new tenants in PS 109 will be locals of El Barrio neighborhood.
There are a few stipulations for potential residents. Applicants must meet the annual income $19,000-$35,000 for one person and $35,000-$50,000 for a family of four, reports Fast Company. Secondly, applicants are interviewed to determine if they meet the artist’s preference criteria and display enthusiasm to participate in the community.
Gloria Duque is one such hopeful applicant. For the past 27 years, she has lived and worked in El Barrio. With space hard to find in New York City, Duque is eager to land a spot in PS 109, which has its own gallery and community areas.
Ultimately, PS 109 is meant to preserve and grow the art scene that makes the area unique.
“The danger of a gentrifying New York is that every community starts to feel the same. The cultural ecosystems become not only less diverse, but the culture of New York as a whole becomes less vital,” Shawn McLearen, Artspace’s vice president of property development and project director for PS 109, says. “Today, you can go in any community, and it feels like it’s a community. That’s the sort of thing we need to invest in.”
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Why Does This Housing Complex Have Seniors Reaching for a Paintbrush?

For some seniors — especially those who’ve engaged in the arts all their lives — watching TV or playing shuffleboard or bingo simply doesn’t qualify as stimulating entertainment.
That’s why the nonprofit EngAGE is bringing all kinds of high-quality arts activities, from painting to theater, to affordable senior housing complexes in southern California. The group even spurred the creation of several unique arts colonies just for seniors: the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, the NoHo Senior Arts Colony and the Long Beach Senior Arts Colony. These housing complexes ensure that residents’ lives are enriched with arts through such activities as theater groups, a fine arts collective, music programming, an indie film company and an intergenerational arts program that brings in the kids in from the Burbank Unified School District to create art with the seniors.
EnGAGE founder Tim Carpenter worked in the healthcare industry when he teamed up with housing developer John Huskey to build this new type of senior living community. To start, they offered a creative writing class at one housing complex. From there, the reach of their services expanded, touching people who don’t live in the retirement communities, but are attracted to the arts programming that they offer.
“You have this great synergy of the physical amenities with the intellectual ones,” Carpenter tells NEA Arts Magazine. “And so that tends to be powerful within the community itself. It also becomes an attractor to people from the outside community…to have a place where people want to go to learn because it’s a beautiful building and there are interesting people living there.”
Caroline McElroy is an artist “in permanent residence” at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony in North Hollywood. She teaches a weekly collage class that’s scheduled to run 90 minutes, but often ends up lasting for hours as seniors get lost in their creations.
McElroy says that the Colony “is a place of possibilities. My son-in-law goes, ‘So how long do you plan on living here?’ and I said, ‘Honey, they’re going to have to carry me out of here.’”
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How Going to the Movies Can Help People with Developmental Disabilities

More than 65 percent of adults with disabilities are unemployed.
That’s a statistic Valerie Jensen was committed to change as the president of a Connecticut-based organization called SPHERE, which helps people with developmental disabilities.
One day, Jensen was inspired by an empty building that used to be a movie theater: Why not refurbish it and open it as a theater staffed by disabled adults?
Through plenty of hard work and collaboration with other organizations in Ridgefield, Conn., Jensen brought The Prospector Theater to life. Doyle Coffin Architecture designed the building, which features four theaters, a restaurant and a café, and chef Raffaele Gallo came up with the menu. Best yet? The program runs without any government funding, sustaining itself through donations and movie ticket and popcorn sales.
Prospector Theater employees offer moviegoers first-run films such as “Interstellar” and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1,” plus first-class customer service. “We are returning the cinema to what movie going used to be like,” Jensen tells the Christian Science Monitor. “People will be dazzled by the fantastic customer service. And with that I hope their attitudes will be opened and changed about hiring people with disabilities. We want to break the cycle of unemployment.”
Prospector Theater shows many of its movies during the day — a must, Jensen explained — because it’s difficult for disabled people to find transportation for jobs at night. It also offers training to its employees in such skills as photo editing and cooking.
Jensen says, “Our goal is to have people leave us.” But not without helping plenty of customers have a stellar movie-going experience first.
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To Fight PTSD, This Veteran Cross Stitches

With treatments for PTSD ranging from equine therapy and scuba diving to a nudist lifestyle, it’s clear that what works to ease one veteran’s PTSD symptoms might not work for another. Regardless of method, anything that relaxes someone suffering is beneficial.
Veteran David Jurado couldn’t shake the troubled thoughts that serving in Iraq left him with. About his time serving overseas, he tells the Greenville Online, “We definitely saw our fair share of battle. I lost really good friends through IED (improvised explosive device) explosions.”
A few years after Jurado returned home from Iraq to Greenville, S.C., he began to seek help for his PTSD. Companions for Heroes helped him train a service dog from the Greenville Humane Society. “With the resources that Companions for Heroes had to offer, I was able to able to raise my own service dog in about a year’s time,” Jurado says. “The service dog really broke my anti-social shell. I was ready to take on whatever the world had to throw at me.”
While the dog helped, Jurado kept seeking other activities to ease his PTSD — including cross stitching, a craft that his mom taught him when he was eight-years-old. “My wife gave me a pattern, and I jumped right back into it for a reason. It’s something that keeps my mind from wandering into places I don’t want to go or remember,” he says. “Life is pretty simple when all you’ve got to worry about is needle and thread.”
Jurado transitioned from his former career as a police officer to working for Companions for Heroes. He has been so successful with figuring out what techniques help him to manage his PTSD symptoms that the Wounded Warrior Project selected to become a peer mentor for other vets with similar issues.
Now Jurado is always ready to help two other veterans in the Greenville area. “Helping other people with their challenges helps me better handle mine,” he says.
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This 85-Year-Old Knitter Churns Out Hats to Help Homeless Veterans

Seven years ago, 85-year-old Orville “Mark” Skattum, who served in the Army National Guard during the Korean conflict, took up a new hobby: knitting.
He got the idea after seeing a friend work on a loom. After getting one of his own, he started knitting hats to give to family and friends at Christmas. Then, he realized that homeless veterans could use some extra warmth.
“I feel sorry for the ones that have a hard time. They’re homeless and out of work,” he tells Kevin Simpson of the Denver Post. “The least I can do is help out a little.”
Skattum began knitting about five hats a week, each with a tag that reads, “Made by a Vet, for a Vet…God bless.” Whenever he has completed 50 hats, he donates them either to his church or to the Denver V.A. hospital to be given to needy vets. He estimates he’s knitted 1,200 hats.
Last year, his daughter Karla Tillapaugh joked with her father about getting a booth at Holiday ManCraft, a hipster-delighting fair that has been showcasing the wares of crafty men — many of them professional artisans — since 2000. She didn’t realize he’d taken her seriously until several months later, when he told her that he’d knitted 150 caps for his booth. Tillapaugh quickly contacted the craft fair organizers to see if her dad could join.
ManCraft founder Stu Alden immediately accepted him. “How can you say no to that?” he tells the Denver Post. “There was something really touching that he got excited about it.”
Skattum will be selling his specialty hat, called Orville’s Bucket, when Holiday ManCraft takes over a Denver VFW Post on December 5 and a Boulder, Colo., American Legion on December 6.
Not surprisingly, Skattum plans to donate any proceeds to charity.
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