The Birth of a Nonprofit Organization

The story of Voices UnBroken’s birth is my story.  It is a story I have told often, yet each time I marvel at what a journey it has been since that day almost a decade ago when I innocently decided to ‘start a workshop for the girls.’  I was a junior at Bennington College and had returned home to The Bronx for the winter to do an internship at an arts organization in Manhattan.  There were some male writers going to Rikers to facilitate a poetry workshop for incarcerated boys attending Island Academy High School.  I asked if I could join them, mostly out of curiosity.  Growing up, Rikers Island was a place people talked about, but only in the most casual way.  “Hey, you seen Gary?” “You didn’t hear?  He’s been on Rikers since last month.”  Or, “like I told him, he better stop doin’ that stuff ‘cause I ain’t goin’ out to no jail to visit him or send him packages or nothin’.”  As a teenager, I wrote in my journal that jail made people quiet, because everyone I knew who went to Rikers came back that way: quiet.

My first request for clearance was denied.  The male poets told me, “You look like a little girl.”  Without knowing where this statement would lead me, I said “---- you, I’ll start a workshop for the girls.”

It took me a year to gain clearance to facilitate a poetry workshop for adolescent girls (ages 16-18) at Rosewood High School on Rikers Island (the high school has since merged with Island Academy High School).  After that initial poetry workshop, I was offered a teaching position at the school and taught there briefly before resigning.  As I was resigning, I asked the principal if I could keep coming back once a week to facilitate a poetry workshop, and she agreed.  I began substitute teaching at various high schools and working a series of part time jobs – as an administrative assistant, a community organizer, a youth worker and as an academic counselor for women coming home from prison.  I was also facilitating workshops anywhere I could.  Sometimes these workshops were set up by a nonprofit organization and sometimes I just talked my way into a prison or community setting that spoke to me.  It was very intuitive and very exhausting.  When you begin, as I do, with the premise that all people matter and all people have a unique and sacred story to tell, there is no end to the work to be done. 

Other people in this book write about being a ‘teaching artist,’ but this was not my initial experience as a facilitator.  I was not an ‘artist’ – I kept a journal religiously and was a poet-on-the-low, but had not published or performed my own writing.  I believe this is an important distinction because it helps answer the “why start an organization?” question teaching artists sometimes ask me.  The assumption behind this question is that I gave up something to start the organization.  Perhaps, if I had already been an artist in my own rite, this would have been true, but I didn’t read a poem onstage until after I taught my first workshop.  I didn’t really believe I was an artist until I had my heart broken for the first time, and I discovered I could write the terrible – and beautiful – things I did not know how to say.

In fact, Voices UnBroken was more of a gift I received than a decision I made.  In 1999, a friend left a message on my answering machine telling me about a foundation that wanted to fund organizations run by young women, “… all you need is a name, a proposal and a fiscal sponsor.”  After my first visit to Rikers, I scribbled, “Sisters, may your voices go unbroken,” into my journal, the origin of the name Voices UnBroken.  I contacted the organization I had been interning for when this work began, and they agreed to serve as my fiscal sponsor.  A friend of a friend offered to let me use a computer at Columbia University to write my first proposal.  In 2000, Voices UnBroken received our first grant of $2,000, which I used to buy a computer, a printer and card stock for printing brochures.

For the next five years, Voices UnBroken was my roommate; we lived together in my tiny studio apartment.  That apartment hosted writing workshops, housed a resource library and was the work site for our first two staff members – two brilliant high school students who had their own set of keys and were often waiting for me when I got home from teaching.  Voices UnBroken served over 1,500 people during those first few years.  It is easy to be nostalgic as I write about this phase of the organization’s development, but it was, in fact, a very difficult time.  The apartment had no heat and, with limited funding and bit of a martyr complex, I chose not to take a salary and, instead, found myself working and teaching to the point of exhaustion.

In 2001, Voices UnBroken and I were awarded the Union Square Award.  There were two awards ceremonies, the second of which was held at the Church of Saint John the Divine.  I had been told that I would have to go onstage to accept the award, but I was not prepared for the crews of people who went before me – every organization seemed to have at least a dozen staff or participants accompanying them.  When it was my time to accept the award, I ascended the stairs of the stage alone and stood there, alone, giving a somewhat-prepared speech and reading a few poems by my students.  I could write that I felt my students’ presence there that night, that they were there in spirit, but I do not want to glorify the solitary process of teaching inside and of founding an organization.  The only thing I felt that night, aside from a very cautious sense of pride, was a loneliness that characterizes this work.  Prison work is lonely work.  This is something we do not all speak about, all of us who do this work and are shaped as much by the act of leaving prisons as we are by what happens while we’re in them.  Not only is teaching in jails or prisons lonely work, but so is the act of founding an organization.

What about my Board of Directors, my staff, my friends, my family, my students?  With so many people ‘in my corner,’ how could I possibly feel alone?  I used to ask myself this question, but as the organization has grown, I have come to understand that this kind of solitude has been necessary.  It is important that anyone who wants to start a nonprofit organization understands that, while there are many things you can share with others, the ultimate responsibility of the organization’s growth and well-being will be yours alone.  It is both overwhelming and humbling to know that I have been trusted to do this awesome and important work.

That said, it was also critical that Voices UnBroken and I get our own places.  In 2005, a grant from the Union Square Awards Grants Program made it possible for Voices UnBroken to move into an office/workshop space on 149th Street and 3rd Avenue in The Bronx.  This move represented a new phase for the organization.  In a matter of months, we hired our first program staff, welcomed community members to our office for workshops and began increasing our programs.  This kind of growth required an increase in funding, which has forced me to learn new skills and develop new relationships.

Suddenly, the skills I had honed – cooking a full meal while facilitating a writing workshop in my living room/kitchen/office, crafting a budget that accurately reflected the in-kind donations that sustained us, writing a lesson plan on the hour-long train ride before a workshop, answering the phone, “Good Morning, Voices UnBroken,” at 7 AM, etc. – are not the most important skills.  Being a good Executive Director and a responsible Founder means embracing this challenge to learn an entirely new set of skills and to ensure that the values I founded the organization on are something we intentionally communicate to others.  It is my responsibility as the Founder and Executive Director to lead Voices UnBroken with our mission to guide us and our participants to ground us.

As my role for the organization has changed and my time has increasingly become a commodity, I continue to facilitate the poetry workshop on Rikers that initially introduced to this work.  Traveling to that rancid island has been a weekly ritual that I have maintained through even the most chaotic and emotional times.  Each week, I cross the bridge that connects Rikers to Queens on my way in and on my way out – and in each direction I whisper words of thanks, for the hundreds of students I have taught and for all that they have taught me.