Setting the Stage for Connection Between Veterans and Their Communities

When service members separate or retire from the military, more than 45,000 nonprofits, thousands of public agencies, and countless other organizations and individuals aim to support their transitions back to civilian life. This series explores how communities across the country are collaborating across public, private, business, and social sectors to better connect the systems that serve veterans, by leveraging the principles of “collective impact.” The subjects featured are all members of National Veterans Intermediary (NVI) Local Partner collaboratives. 
Recent research shows that loneliness is a health risk factor for many. A 2018 study suggests that social connectedness may even protect veterans, for example, against developing symptoms of PTSD. Opportunities to connect, however, can be tough to find. It can be difficult for veterans to talk about their experiences, especially with people who have not shared them and may not understand. The social gap in connectivity and understanding between current and former members of the military community and their civilian counterparts is known as the “civilian-military divide,” and for many, it can represent the isolation of the veteran experience.
Theater of War Productions is working to change that by using theater to bridge the divide and create opportunities for connection. Through dramatic readings of iconic plays, followed by candid discussions about themes related to service and reintegration, the 10-year-old company aims to help audiences gain a deeper understanding of the complex experiences that many of our nation’s veterans share.
The company’s hallmark project, the eponymously named Theater of War (ToW) , is designed to increase awareness of the invisible wounds of war. Professional actors read ancient Greek dramas — long thought to have originated both as a storytelling medium and a form of communal therapy — to audiences comprised of service members, veterans, and civilians.
The subject matter is intentionally weighty. In Sophocles’ “Ajax,” for example, a warrior of great strength and courage is betrayed by his kings and unjust gods, and ends up dying by suicide.  
“[These tragedies] are a way to talk about the utter horrors of war and the challenges that it brings,” said Lisa Feder-Feitel, who works at ToW to identify leaders, local organizations, libraries, schools and others to secure community panelists and fill the seats. Some of those hardships are obvious, like being separated from family. But military service can also lead to other challenging emotional experiences, including, as Feder-Feitel puts it,  “feeling alone — even though you’re part of a system and a brotherhood.”
The paradox of feeling isolated even in the presence of others is an experience familiar to many veterans, and one that ToW is directly addressing by building community conversations that include audiences that may not immediately see themselves as stakeholders in veterans’ wellness.

Theater of War Productions is using theater to bridge the civ-mil divide.

To expand its impact, ToW applies “collective impact” theory. This approach allows ToW to enlist a diverse network of organizations and government agencies in support of a goal related to one of its plays or conversations, and then coordinate activities to meet that goal. 
Jennifer Splansky Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum, which supports those who adopt the approach, noted that relationship-building and effective communication are critical to the success of collective-impact models.
“Building trust [means] the groups that are involved in collaborating are doing what they’re best at, and the sum is greater than its individual parts,” Juster said.
In the case of ToW, that might translate to help from partnering government agencies and nonprofits — ranging from the Department of Defense to the USO — in getting the word out about performances, distributing free tickets, and transporting veterans to productions at military installations, hospitals, libraries, homeless shelters and public parks.
ToW measures the impact of its productions through post-performance audience surveys, focus groups and impact-assessment studies conducted by outside evaluators. But the best metric may be that of the audience in the moment.
“If you’re looking for impact, come into the room and watch what happens,” said Doerries. “Theater itself is a certain experience that pushes people into a different cognitive space.”
Feder-Feitel keeps in touch with groups that attend ToW performances. Many ask to be invited to future events. 
“We want, in a very tiny way, to duplicate what Sophocles did,” Feder-Feitel said. “That is, create an opportunity for people to feel safe, to feel valued and to speak from their hearts about their different experiences. They go from here, knowing they’re part of a larger community.”


This article was produced in partnership with National Veterans Intermediary, an initiative of the Bob Woodruff Foundation. NVI increases the collaborative capacity of local communities to steward a national ecosystem, in order to achieve optimal well-being for veterans and their families. Sign up for alerts about NVI’s free webinars and tools to support community-based collaboration here.

In These Prisons, Former Offenders Find Healing in Theatre Arts

Omar Williams is an actor — a deadly one, he jokes. Having spent 21 years in prison for kidnapping and attempted murder, the Fishkill Correctional Facility inmate says he’s been acting his whole life to get what he wants.
“I know exactly how to play you,” he tells me from one of the counseling offices at the prison, which is located about 60 miles north of New York City. “I could tell you anything to bullshit you, to rob you, to kill you. I’ve been acting my whole life.”
Minutes later, Williams — known as “Sweets” to his fellow inmates — stands in a classroom and recites lines to the 19th-century French play Cyrano de Bergerac.
In the scene, de Bergerac joins his friend Le Bret — played by Williams — among sleeping soldiers and talks about how he just cheated death, again. The director, Charlie Scatamacchia, stops the scene halfway through to give Williams a basic lesson in being a thespian: You gotta emote.
“You’re just reading the words,” Scatamacchia tells him. “Actually say what they’re saying.”
As the scene starts up again, Williams is animated and expressive; his whole body is in movement. It’s not exactly a Tony Award-winning performance, but Scatamacchia approves. He nods emphatically. Williams is nailing it.
The rehearsal is part of a program run by volunteers with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a New York nonprofit that provides workshops and classes in a myriad of disciplines, from theater and music to creative writing, painting and dance, in men’s and women’s prisons around the state. The goal: to facilitate the social, emotional and cognitive skills needed to succeed on the outside.
Similar art-as-therapy programs are found only in a handful of states, despite the fact that they’ve been proven to be effective in reducing disciplinary infractions and improving anger management. One 2012 study found a nearly three-fold increase in inmates pursuing college-level academics after participating in RTA. Inmates have also shown enhanced speaking skills and self-esteem. But perhaps most impressive: RTA boasts a nearly 5 percent recidivism rate, meaning almost 95 percent of people who go through the program don’t reoffend after their release. That’s a genuinely remarkable percentage, as the national recidivism rate is close to 77 percent after five years.
Unfortunately, arts programs are also usually the first to be cast aside when a prison has a need for more beds or security. And not everyone is a fan, either: Critics, including corrections officers and victims, claim that “cold-blooded” killers and hardened criminals don’t deserve prison-arts programs. But the flip side, argue prison-reform advocates, is that, eventually, most will be released back into their communities, and so it’s to everyone’s benefit that they be rehabilitated in whatever way works before that happens.
“Do we want them to be better criminals when they get out, or to make better choices,” asks Craig Cullinane, director of programming for RTA. “These people who commit crimes, they should have the ability to go back to the world better than when they come in. Isn’t that what we want?”

OUT OF THE DARKNESS

Fishkill’s prison is a visual tease. The all-male medium-security prison boasts a prepossessing Gothic façade set against the bucolic backdrop of the Hudson Valley’s lush greenery. In early spring, a mist envelops the grounds, making it impossible to see that the prison is surrounded by over 20-foot-high chain-link fences wrapped by barbed wire.
Every day at 6 p.m. the men weave their way through the complex, walking down paved streets in between fences and buildings for their allotted nightly recreation time. Twice a week the dozen or so men that participate in RTA meet to go over lines, stagecraft and scene construction.
For those who have bad days — and there’s no denying there are a lot of those in prison — RTA is a welcome escape.
“The first thing we do is we go around and share one word about how we feel that day. I want them to share honestly, but in reality they’re dealing with a lot of crap,” says Scatamacchia, who has been directing plays with RTA for two years as a volunteer.
Williams had one of those bad days about two and half years ago. His twin children were stillborn. Out of rage and sorrow, he threatened to stab another inmate in the neck.
“I could’ve killed someone that day. Thank God for RTA at that moment,” he says. “They really helped me through it.”

Inmates at Fishkill Correctional Facility practice their performance as part of Rehabilitation Through the Arts.

The program is not intended to remake prisoners into professional actors. It’s not designed to help them find a career in the arts after release. Rather, says executive director Katherine Vockins, who founded RTA in 1996, it provides inmates the opportunity to tap into emotions and develop the soft skills that can help them deal with tough situations.
That’s not to say it’s easy.
“We are all looking for the ‘fix’ that will take people — often badly damaged by life experience — and put them through some magical program that washes, dries and folds, ending with neatly functioning citizens,” says Vockins, adding that progress is hard to measure in terms of before and after. “Deep, lasting change in cognition and behavior does not work that way.”
California was one of the first states to bring the arts to correctional facilities. In 1977, the Prison Arts Project, a program run by the nonprofit William James Association, was introduced at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. A few years later, its success led to a new administrative office, Arts-in-Corrections, within the California Department of Corrections.
The University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), launched in 1990, started out by teaching painting to less than 50 female inmates. Today the program is available at every prison in the state, and PCAP hosts one of the largest prisoner-art exhibitions in the world.
“For the incarcerated, the fact that somebody on the outside is reaching out to make connections and to see people beyond their prison numbers, in itself, has value,” says Elaine Chen, PCAP’s events and exhibits coordinator. “Even just to connect with people without a reason or a shield of social justice — just to do art together — brings a lot of therapeutic value.”
Research into Michigan’s program has shown that inmates who take part in the arts report an 86 percent higher quality of life while in prison than before they joined PCAP, and 93 percent self-reported learning new and better ways to express themselves, according to Chen.
“We can transform our lives, even in here,” says Ronald “Bach” Jarvis, a Fishkill inmate and RTA participant who has been serving 17 years for manslaughter. “[RTA] helped me find myself. It’s easy to get lost in here in the mist and darkness. But to find that light? That’s what this program is for me.”

A FUNDING FAILURE

Despite numerous studies showing that arts education works inside of prison — as well as outside, in terms of reoffending once released — programs continue to be cut from state budgets across the country, with more expected in the next few months.
California’s Arts-in-Corrections, for example, was almost eliminated in 2003 when the state was in the depths of a financial crisis. The program was saved by private investors, including members of California Lawyers for the Arts, who donated heavily to the program.
Other state-run arts-rehabilitation programs might not be so lucky. In the Trump Administration’s latest budget proposal, funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which only makes up less than 1 percent of the national budget, would be cut from $150 million to $29 million. The NEA funds, in part, almost every prison-arts program in the country.
Though RTA does not receive direct funding from NEA grants, it does get money from the New York State Council on the Arts, which has received over $3.5 million from the NEA since 2013, according to the endowment’s archives. Money from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) is also at risk.
“The shakiness of the economy has affected the NYS budget,” Vockins says. “[We have been told] that while the DOCCS budget is huge, the allocation to programs is quite small. Even vocational programs have been severely cut.”
Outside of funding, there is also a problem with capacity. RTA, for example, operates in five prisons throughout New York but relies almost wholly on volunteers.
“Until a year ago, we [had been] four people for 20 years,” says Cullinane, the director of programming. “It comes down to leadership and what [our state leaders] care about. We get very little from the state; we raise almost all our money ourselves.”

THE MEN BEHIND THE BARS

Cyrano is an interesting choice of a play,” Scatamacchia says. He’s sipping coffee at the NoMad Library Bar in Manhattan, telling me about his background in theater and how he came to volunteer with RTA.
The task of teaching the art of acting to prisoners wasn’t something that he expected to be so fulfilling, he says, adding that, initially, he was afraid of what he would encounter. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised at how easygoing and intelligent the men were.
“It’s totally different from television,” he says of his experience.
The participants in the program get to decide which play to put on — for his first RTA gig, Scatamacchia directed them in The Odd Couple — and the choice of Cyrano de Bergerac set him aback. “It’s not like we teach theory or anything like that, but there is an interesting lesson to be taken from this play. You can’t look at [the character of] Cyrano and know everything about him,” he says.
The feeling of constantly being judged is something that many of the men at Fishkill experience. They say that those on “the outside” just don’t care to know about the lives of people on the inside. It’s easy to feel forgotten.
But RTA has helped them feel remembered and recognized, even in a small way.
“This makes me feel special,” says Jarvis. “Attention is positive. If I can strike people positively in this form, it makes me feel human again.”
October 8, 2018 3:20 p.m.: This story’s headline has been changed.

The Most Meaningful Literature, Entertainment and Art of 2016

In a late-night victory speech, President-elect Donald Trump called his base “the forgotten men and women of our country,” and he promised they “will be forgotten no longer.” His line embodied the spirit of 2016: This was the year that nationwide events put a spotlight on plights that can no longer be overlooked. Beyond Trump’s core base of white working-class voters, there was an assortment of marginalized communities making headlines, from the gay Latinos targeted at an Orlando nightclub to the black men confronted by police in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul; from indigenous peoples protesting a pipeline in the Dakotas to those fleeing climate change in Alaska and Louisiana; and from hijab-wearing victims of hate crimes to unemployed veterans.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, because where there is strife there is also powerful art to make sense of it. And 2016’s collection of books, movies, TV, plays, music and other works was no different, helping us see these groups, to understand their grievances and develop a response. After polling our staff, here is the art that most moved us at NationSwell in 2016.
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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.”
MORE: Meet the Photographer Who Captures Veterans’ Emotions About Returning to the Civilian World

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.’”
MORE: These Startups Offer Sleek Technological Innovations for the Elderly

How the Bard is Helping Veterans in Milwaukee

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate theater professor Bill Watson had a notion that engaging with the works of William Shakespeare would help veterans cope with the problems they faced reintegrating into society, including PTSD. After all, in several of his plays, the Bard captured the conflicted, powerful feelings of warriors both in the midst of battle and after the fighting stopped.
So a year and a half ago, with the help of his professional actor wife, Nancy Smith-Watson, and Jim Tasse, an adjunct theater professor, Bill started Feast of Crispian, an organization that guides veterans in performing Shakespeare through methods uniquely tailored to their needs.
Feast of Crispian began working with veterans who were receiving treatment for substance abuse issues, PTSD and other problems at the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center. So far, the group has held nine weekend-long workshops for veterans that start with the selection of selecting passages from Shakespeare that have roles for two veterans with plenty of conflict, vivid emotions, and only short lines of dialogue so not to trip up the beginning actors.
“We really get right into it Friday night,” Smith-Watson tells Meg Jones of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “creating a sense of group dynamic, asking them to connect with everyone else in the group really quickly. We’ve been floored at how much that works, that by the end of the first night we have 12 to 18 people who came in saying, ‘I came to check this out but I probably won’t be back tomorrow.’ Yet we rarely lose anyone. They give up a whole weekend to do the work.”
On Saturday and Sunday, they cast the scenes and professional actors work with the veterans to get them expressing the emotions Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago, yet still speak to the vets’ experiences. The actors define archaic words and feed the veterans their lines as they perform so they don’t have to worry about memorizing. On Sunday afternoon, the vets give a performance that’s open to the public.
Jeff Peterson, a Navy veteran who played the role of Hector in “Troilus and Cressida” in the group’s most recent performance, tells Jones, “It’s an emotional experience like no other treatment. This is something I look forward to. I don’t want it to end.”
Marine Corps veteran John Buck, who portrayed Caliban in a scene from “The Tempest,” agrees. “I consider it theater therapy. It gets veterans to open up about their problems,” he says. “You see veterans slowly opening up throughout the weekend.”
MORE: How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide

How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide

In 2008, playwright Jonathan Wei became bothered by how few people knew what active duty soldiers and their families were going through. So he founded The Telling Project, a non-profit that provides veterans and their families the chance to tell their stories of military service. Since then, fifteen productions of The Telling Project have debuted, each one a unique rendition of the trials and triumphs of local veterans. Wei is now working with Texas A&M theater arts professor Michael Greenwald, who is teaching 20 veterans and their families how to perform their stories for a live audience in “Telling Aggieland,” which will be staged in the spring.
“Some of our stories are funny, some are sad and some are us doing whatever we can to make it through that moment in time,” cast member and Army Captain Rebecca Lesemann told John Rangel of The Battalion. “‘Telling Aggieland’ is a wonderful way to share these experiences with the community, providing a small glimpse into the life of a soldier.”

For This Iraq Veteran and Actor, Hollywood’s Hard Knocks Don’t Seem So Tough

When Chris DeVinny served as a Forward Observer in the Army in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, one of his most unpleasant experiences was digging through burning garbage, trying to locate some missing guns. He told Erin Prater of the Fort Collins Gazette, “I remember thinking, ‘No matter what happens, where I’m at in the civilian world, I’ll always be able to look back on this day and remember that nothing sucked as bad as this.”
This perspective has proved useful as DeVinny pursues an acting career in Los Angeles, and endures the disappointments typical of aspiring actors. After his discharge from the army, DeVinny used GI Bill funding to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. Since then DeVinny, now 27, has landed several parts in theater productions, and works as a handyman on the side. What DeVinny thought might be his big break came in September of 2013, when he was cast in a small roll as a Navy master-at-arms in NBC’s drama “Ironside.” Unfortunately the show, starring Blair Underwood as a wheelchair-bound police detective, was canceled before the episode DeVinny appeared in aired, sending him back to auditions. But he’s also writing a play about Iraq War veterans and plans to cast fellow veterans in all the starring roles. There shouldn’t be any complaints, no matter how grueling the rehearsals are.

This Non-Profit Thinks Autistic Kids Should Be Able to Enjoy The Same Things As Other Kids

It can be difficult for families with autistic children to enjoy public outings. Strangers sometimes find their behavior distracting or disruptive. But the Theater Development Fund wanted to help these families enjoy live theater, so the nonprofit organized four Broadway productions a year for people who need a little more understanding and a little less stimulation. In November the organization invited families to a special production of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” where ushers handed out squeeze balls to help autistic kids relax. The producers turned the volume down by twenty percent and eliminated strobe lights because autistic people can be sensitive to loud noises and bright lights. In the lobby, experienced volunteers staffed break rooms and quiet areas where theater patrons could take a break whenever the stimulation became too intense in the packed house. The idea of making theater accessible to all people is taking hold off Broadway too—for example, the Lone Tree Arts Center near Denver recently staged a “sensory-friendly” performance of its holiday show. These programs join sensory-friendly movie screenings and restaurant nights in helping families struggling with Autism to enjoy themselves outside their homes.