On the drive home from Priya Shah’s first Storycatchers musical, she pulled over. She was teary-eyed and emotionally moved by the musical she had just watched.
Shah, who now serves as the executive director of Storycatchers, had just seen a musical at the Illinois Youth Center, a juvenile facility in Warrenville, Illinois. She watched girls tell stories of sexual abuse, battery and neglect. She also saw stories of hope and resilience.
“It struck me that these characters I had just watched struggle, joke, grieve and triumph on stage, that they’re not just characters,” she told NationSwell. “They’re based on real people with real stories.”
Shah left a corporate career to work with those girls and similar young people at Storycatchers Theatre.
Storycatchers Theatre — also known as Storycatchers — is a nonprofit musical theater group that works with justice-involved youth in Chicago. Through programming both inside and outside of the justice centers, children and young adults turn their life stories into musicals.
The young actors and actresses perform for a wide variety of audience members, including elementary school students, community members, judges, legislators and police officers. Last year, the nonprofit worked with 228 young people and hosted 127 performances inside and outside of juvenile detention centers, for over 5,000 audience members.
“It’s kind of a dual-purpose program, these young people have a place to tell their story, to be heard, to be validated, to find coping mechanisms in order to move on from their trauma,” Tory Davidson, Storycatchers’ community engagement manager, told NationSwell. “But then also we organizationally find platforms for young people’s voices to be heard and for them to inform people of power.”
Storycatchers has two programs: one that engages 13- to 18-year-olds inside three juvenile detention centers in or near Chicago, and another program called Changing Voices, which works with young people who are between the ages of 17 and 24 and are justice-involved, typically on parole, probation or post-release.
Changing Voices employs 21 young adults for 30 hours a week at Chicago’s minimum wage. Through that, they receive wraparound services, such as resume building, conflict management, financial literacy and job acquisition. They work with case managers and artist educators, who help them develop the musicals. A single day may start with a morning workshop on how to secure a job interview to an afternoon choreography rehearsal to a lesson on keeping calm in moments of crisis.
A cohort of four or five people work together to write their individual stories, create a group script, add music to the script, practice and then perform the musicals. Individuals typically stay in the program for about eight months, but some stay longer.
The Storycatchers team believes that trauma is the core reason that individuals end up in the justice system. Researchers have found a link between crime and unresolved trauma. So by telling and performing their story, they learn from the trauma and overcome it, said Shah.
“We believe that if we give diversion programming and arts programming and mental health support … it drastically changes the trajectory of their life because they understand what the actions are and what the consequences are,” she said.
The goal is to leave Storycatchers prepared for success, which may mean enrolling in higher education, landing a steady job or rekindling family bonds. Each story of success is different, said Shah.
For Quincy, success means pursuing a degree in theater. “I love acting, and I’m going to try and pursue it,” he said. Quincy, 19, learned about Storycatchers after his own encounter with the justice system. He had grown up watching Disney Channel, so acting was always a passion. He said Storycatchers felt like a great opportunity to prepare for a job and gain training as an actor. So Quincy applied, interviewed, auditioned and was accepted to the Changing Voices program.
A year and a half later, he’s performed close to a hundred shows and worked with dozens of fellow actors and actresses.
“We are all human beings, so we’re all going to make mistakes,” Quincy told NationSwell. “It’s called life experience, so you just have to live through it and think beyond the point where you shouldn’t have made that decision.”
Thanks to Storycatchers, Quincy has overcome trauma and created a foundation for a career.
For another Storycatchers actor, it meant accepting male role models. Shah shared the story of a young man who had been abandoned by his father. The actor wrote a story about his dad leaving his home and never coming back.
The life event led to a lot of anger and challenges, but by writing and performing his trauma, he worked through it.
“We saw him overcome [his trauma] and have a positive relationship with male role models in his life,” Shah said.
The playwrights, writing about their own experiences, perform in their shows but never as themselves. They assume the role of their mothers, their grandfathers, a police officer or friend, for example. The idea is for them to experience their own situations from a new perspective.
“So by role-playing, you’re having people imagine a world that’s different from what they’d imagined before,” Shah said. “From the time they start writing their stories, to the time they perform it … they’re validating their stories.”
Storycatchers began performing life stories in 1984 when Meade Palidofsky founded the organization. She started working with young people across Chicago to transform their personal stories into musicals.
She ended up workshopping and creating a show in one of Chicago’s juvenile detention centers. After the performance and workshop were over, the juveniles were aching to start their next musical, Davidson said. Their eagerness led Palidofsky to continue to work with justice-involved individuals. In 2016, Storycatchers decided to focus solely with justice-involved youth.
Twenty-nine years later, the program is still strong. The leaders at Storycatchers hope to deepen their impact in Chicago by expanding its outreach.
Storycatchers currently has plenty of anecdotal stories pointing to their success, but there isn’t evidence-based research to support their work — yet. The University of Chicago Urban Labs is currently looking at Storycatchers’ rates of recidivism and employment among its graduates to track their success. That data will be released in 2022.
“We believe in strong collaboration. We believe in strong relationships,” Shah said. “And a strong ecosystem to be able to provide an equitable platform for our youth.”
More: The Broadway Theater Company Giving Troubled Teens a Second Act
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Illinois Youth Center is a juvenile detention center. It is a juvenile facility. Storycatchers Theatre also realigned its mission in 2016, not 1990. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.
Tag: Trauma
A Vision of Healing, and Hope, for Formerly Incarcerated Women
Topeka K. Sam sits on a plush purple sofa in the living room of an immaculate row house in the Bronx, ordaining all of the ladies in the room. Sam, a founder of Hope House, a residence for previously incarcerated women, points to her cofounder, Vanee Sykes. “She’s a Lady of Hope,” Sam says, then swivels and points at another woman who has just entered the room. “That’s another Lady of Hope.” And, apparently, so too is this reporter. “The Ladies of Hope is you, and it’s all of us,” she adds. “If you are a resource to women who are coming here, then you are a Lady of Hope, you know? It’s about all women empowering other women and providing them hope and opportunity.”
Both Sam and Sykes know something about needing hope to thrive, having been formerly incarcerated themselves. Their experience with the difficulties most women face when trying to reintegrate into society led them to found Hope House, which officially opened its doors in October 2017.
The idea of Hope House, Sam says, is that women coming out of prison have the deck stacked against them. “You gotta start with basic needs,” Sam says. “I can’t advocate for myself or feel that I’m powerful enough to go get a job if I don’t have somewhere to live and I don’t have food in my stomach.”
In addition to food and shelter, Hope House provides another crucial ingredient: community. The house currently accommodates five women, all of whom sleep on the upstairs level. Signs featuring positive aphorisms, like “Love Life,” hang on the walls, and the beds — which the women are required to make every morning — are decorated with stylish coverlets. Downstairs is the kitchen and cozy living room, all walls painted a soothing shade of gray. It’s here that the women gather, cook, talk about their day, and allow themselves to grieve and to heal.
So many women who land in prison are victims of sexual abuse, Sykes says, and Hope House is a place where women can safely process their pain in order to move forward. “Any given night here, we’re hugging and we’re crying, [because] it’s a safe space,” Sykes adds, tearing up as she speaks. “And it’s not just a safe space where we can live, but it’s a safe space mentally. You know, where it’s OK for me to say that this has happened, and that there’s other women here who are not going to judge, but who are just going to say, ‘This is what worked for me’ or ‘This is how I got through this.’ And that’s what I love about being here.”
Sam and Sykes met in 2013 while at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, a low-security prison about 70 miles north of New York City, and the inspiration for the fictional “Litchfield” prison featured in the hit Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black.” Both did time for nonviolent offenses — Sykes for embezzling money, Sam for drug trafficking — and when they got out, they witnessed the insurmountable barriers that women with a rap sheet can face, the greatest of which is, arguably, finding a landlord who will rent to them. “It was in my heart to do a house [like Hope House] while I was in prison,” Sykes says.
But they were also lucky and had supportive families to come home to. Many women, especially poor women, are not so blessed. “When I got home, I started going around, organizing with other women around women’s issues and incarceration,” Sam says. “And just seeing that it was the same issues happening: Women need housing, women need resources, women need all these things.” She threw herself into community activism and founded Ladies of Hope Ministries, an organization dedicated to helping formerly incarcerated women and girls re-enter society and out of which Hope House grew.
Along the way, Sam earned several grants and fellowships, including at Columbia University, where she was named a Beyond the Bars fellow in 2015 and a Justice-in-Education Initiative scholar in 2016. She also received funding and support from Unlocked Futures, a program backed in part by singer John Legend.
Sam modeled Hope House in part off of a California-based nonprofit called A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project, which helps women with housing and related services when they leave prison. The founder of that organization, Susan Burton, became instrumental in offering guidance and seed money to help Sam get Hope House off the ground. “We need to make investments to get people started in the struggle to reduce recidivism, strengthen our communities, and repair the harm done by mass incarceration,” says Burton, who wrote a memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, about her own journey from prison to community activist. “And that’s what Hope House stands for.”
Not that Sam and Sykes didn’t hit some road bumps along the way. They scoured the city for months to find a place to set up shop before they found the cute, fully remodeled row house in the South Central Bronx neighborhood of Castle Hill, a stone’s throw from bucolic Pugsley Creek Park. The landlord loved the idea of the house, but neighbors kicked up a fuss. So Sam and Sykes took to social media and started a campaign they called Stand With Hope House. They did media interviews and went to community board meetings. Eventually their neighbors relented.
“We stood up for ourselves and said that we’re not going anywhere,” Sykes says. “We have a right to live here, just [like] anyone else.”
Sam and Sykes used similar social media savvy when decorating the house, crowd-funding the project via funds donated from strangers around the world. “We put up the registry on social media, and people donated,” Sam says. “It was absolutely phenomenal.” They now have the funding to open another Hope House in New Jersey and after, that, in Brooklyn. Their hope is that others will step in to help them scale the project, possibly turning Hope House into a franchise.
“Ultimately our goal is to have a Hope House in every single state in our country and abroad,” says Sam.
In 2017, Sam won a Soros Justice Fellowship to work on a project around probation and parole accountability. “It came from my experience on probation and parole, [witnessing] the arbitrariness and counterproductiveness that was happening,” she says. “And I knew if this was happening to me, it had to be happening to many other people. I found out that 4.7 million people are on operational parole in this country.”
The majority of people sitting in prisons are there because of technical violations, Sam says. They need support, to be given access to resources and to opportunity — not to be dumped in a federal halfway house and then shackled with an ankle bracelet for six months, adds Sykes, speaking from personal experience. Burton’s own success speaks to this: Since 1998, she has helped over 1,000 women and children with her re-entry homes, and in 2017, she had a 100% success rate in keeping her residents from being reincarcerated.
The stakes are even higher for people of color: Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to be incarcerated in prison or jail, and Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely to be institutionalized. In addition, black children are almost nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison; and Hispanic children are four times more likely to have a parent behind bars.
The impact on their families can last generations. Sykes had three children when she was incarcerated — her oldest then a senior at Howard University, she says with pride — but her spouse died before she was released. And Sykes considers herself lucky: She comes from a stable upper-middle-class family, and so she saw her children, who were then living with her parents, quite frequently. Many women are not so lucky. “The hardest part of incarceration is not being with your children,” she says.
Jessie Jones (not her real name) has been living at the Hope House since last December. Jones, 64, had been out of prison for a decade — after having spent 23 years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for a drug-fueled robbery gone awry — but her housing situation had become untenable. Her last apartment was cheap, she says, because it was illegal and basically falling apart. The landlord started making passes at her, which she allowed once before trying, and failing, to make him stop. Desperate to avoid moving into a shelter, Jones stumbled upon Hope House. Like all residents, Jones had to apply to live in the house, and she pays 30% of her wages as a cook for a nonprofit as rent. (Residents are required to either have a job or be in school when they apply. Students are exempt from paying rent.)
“It’s a beautiful house, and Vanee and Topeka are the best people, the vision of healing,” Jones says. She still has her bad days, but living at Hope House with people who genuinely love and care about her is helping build her confidence back up.
“Hope House is exactly what it is,” she says. “It gives you hope.”
From Battle Scars to Badges of Honor: 13 Questions with Paratrooper Bobette Brown
Bobette Brown, a U.S. Army veteran and motivational speaker, isn’t afraid to speak about her wounds, the physical and mental pain she’s experienced in life. Whether recounting a knee replacement surgery, sexual assault and harassment she experienced in the military or a five-day stretch of sleeplessness from her trauma, she believes that keeping secrets doesn’t do anyone good.
“You don’t have to look like what you’ve been through,” Brown tells the crowd at a Got Your 6 Storytellers event in New York. “See today, you can choose to take your experiences and go from scars to beauty marks. And those battle wounds can become badges of honor. It’s all your decision.”
Known to some of her fans as Lady Bobette, Brown now works as a “transformational architect,” helping to push others forward through difficult experiences through her speaking, coaching and consulting business. NationSwell caught up with Brown to ask about her service as an airborne paratrooper and advice for bouncing back.
What does it mean to be a veteran?
To me, a veteran is someone who has willingly sacrificed and served the United States of America and its citizens. Choosing to serve speaks to the veterans level of commitment, boldness and audaciousness.
What inspired you to serve your country?
I don’t have a heart-wrenching response to this question. Honestly, I decided to join the U.S. Army because I wanted… “Independence.” I wanted to leave my parents’ home and go “be all that I could be.” The Army was very familiar to me, having grown up in the military environment. When the recruiter sweetened the deal by offering me a signing bonus if I went to Airborne school, I jumped at the opportunity.
How can someone support veterans?
Look for daily opportunities to give back and show appreciation to veterans. As much as I am grateful for the public holiday to acknowledge veterans every November 11, I think veterans should be celebrated throughout the year. Veterans are men and women who worked daily to ensure the safety and security of the U.S.A. If there is an opportunity for to volunteer, visit or validate veterans – just do it. Why wait for a “special day?”
What 3 words describe your experience in the service?
Adventurous. Fulfilling. Inspiring.
What is the quality you most admire in a comrade?
Integrity. It speaks to the character, honor and resilience of the service member. We love the slogan “Army Strong,” but the reality I’ve learned is that we are only as strong as the weakest link.
Who are your heroes in real life?
My dad, the man I am named after, Robert “Bobby” Greene, is my hero. He is a highly decorated career officer, Army Ranger, Jumpmaster trainee, Purple Heart recipient and Vietnam survivor. He served in the United States Army for 20 years. When we talk, I often ask him to share stories of his military career and lessons he learned. He is an arsenal of wisdom. He loves his family and has been married to the same woman, my mother, for over 56 years. They are an example of resilience in military families.
Who was the most inspirational person you encountered while serving?
Command Sergeant Major Daisy Brown. She had to be one of the most inspiring women I have ever met. She broke the ceiling as one of the first African American women to hold such a high rank. Yet, she still remained humble and could always find a reason to laugh. A few years ago, we lost contact. I’d love to know what she is doing now.
If you could change one thing about your service, what would it be?
Nothing. Everything I learned and experienced has made me who I am today. I would not want to change any of it.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I do not know if I can narrow it down to one, greatest achievement, especially as I reflect on surviving those 20+ mile rucksack road marches with 30 to 45 pounds on my back. I am also proud that I successfully completed jump school and made numerous jumps without breaking a limb. I can remember the number of people who started airborne training with me but did not finish.
How does being a veteran help you to tap into your resilience?
The years of discipline and training in the military have been crucial to my ability to rebound from numerous personal obstacles that I endured throughout my life. Life is filled with stressful experiences, but when I remember the many obstacles I endured and bounced back from, it continues to serve as motivation and a reminder — if I did it before I can do it again.
What is the key to thriving after experiencing a difficult or traumatic experience?
Finding and getting help from a licensed therapist and staying committed to the course. I went to several therapists in the Veteran Affairs system before I finally found the perfect therapist for me at the Vet Center. A good therapist will challenge you to get better. She or he will challenge you to uproot some extremely painful and traumatic events. There were times when I did not want to go back. But I kept reminding myself, there would be a time when I will have to encourage others to keep going. How would I be able to do that if I gave up? So, my desire to help others really helped me to thrive. Also, I cannot downplay the key importance of having a supportive circle of family and friends.
Why is it important to let our fellow comrades in life help push us through difficult times?
They remind us that difficult times won’t last forever. In spite of all that we’ve experienced our comrades are there showing and reminding us of another reality. We can choose to live life to the fullest or we can allow it to suck the very life from us. Comrades challenge us to go the extra mile, while reminding us they are also running in the same race.
Why shouldn’t people conform?
I like to say that being and staying “authentically you” should be one of your core values. Why be a cheap copy, when you can be a truly amazing original?
These Yoga Teachers Empower Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Survivors to Reclaim Their Lives
Tara Tonini slept with a shotgun. After months of being in a violent relationship, she found the strength to leave and get her own apartment, but her abuser was stalking her and threatened her life.
Sadly, Tonini’s experience isn’t unique.
In the United States, about one in four women will experience domestic violence during her life, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s extremely dangerous for a battered woman to leave an abusive partner, and those who are brave enough to do so often suffer from PTSD for years.
Tonini is now the program director of Exhale to Inhale, a nonprofit that brings free yoga classes to shelters and community centers that serve domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. It also trains volunteer instructors to lead trauma-informed yoga classes. Tonini credits yoga for where she is today.
Check out the video above and witness how the regular practice of yoga can help trauma survivors in tremendous ways.
MORE: Meet the Doctors Building an Innovative, Holistic Bridge to Healthy Living
This War Hero Uses His Trauma Skills to Treat Civilians at Home
If you’ve spent most of your life as a doctor in the armed forces, it goes without saying that you know a thing or two about saving lives.
That’s certainly the case with Dr. Peter Rhee. After completing his training, Rhee was one of seven trauma surgeons in the U.S. Navy. After spending more than 25 years in the trenches, Rhee is retired from service and is using his skills at home to save lives.
As the chief of trauma and emergency surgery at the University of Arizona Medical Center (UAMC), Rhee is helping to improve survival rates and patient care.
He says that in general, a patient’s chance of surviving a gunshot wound to the brain is about 10 percent, but at his institution, it’s astonishingly higher: Around 46 percent.
“That’s because our surgeons and our neurosurgeons have worked together to be very aggressive on who we operate on…” he told ABC News. “The war that we had in Iraq shows us that when we operate more often on these people shot in the brain the survival rate is higher.”
One of his patients, former Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords is living proof of these statistics. After Giffords and 18 others were shot one Saturday morning in 2011 outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, Rhee oversaw her care, as well as treating the others wounded in the incident.
Rhee has written a new memoir, Trauma Red: The Making of a Surgeon in War and in America’s Cities, and has appeared in a number of television news specials like Nightline, but he’s spent his career creating special programs throughout his career to educate doctors on life-threatening injuries.
After the 9/11 attacks, Rhee worked on a program to educate military doctors who have never seen a gun shot wound about the types of injuries they might encounter in war zone areas — especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rhee’s use of his military training to save lives here at home is innovative, noteworthy, and most importantly, reinventing medicine and patient care for Americans. And as more horrific, life-threatening incidents become more common in the United States, doctors are faced with more challenges to save patients. If more military doctors trained in trauma-related surgeries and life-threatening emergencies share their expertise, perhaps even more lives could be saved.
MORE: Here’s What You Probably Didn’t Know About PTSD
Here’s What You Probably Didn’t Know About PTSD
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder gets a lot of attention these days, but it’s not always a well-understood topic. Among the misconceptions about PTSD is the notion that it’s a relatively new diagnosis. It’s not. It’s a serious disorder that affects an estimated 5.2 million American adults every year. It’s common in veterans, although not even 40% of veterans who are diagnosed with PTSD when they come home get treatment. But it’s pervasive in non veterans too; about 7.8% of Americans will experience PTSD at some point in their lives. Tracing a history of PTSD, as far back as the first and second World Wars (and even in ancient mythology and the bible) can lead to a better understanding of the disease. Understanding can lead to better treatment, like cognitive therapy and medication. Perhaps more importantly, better awareness of PTSD will lead to increased ability to recognize the signs and seek help for a loved one. Check out this infographic to learn more.