Shaun's New Job is also a Coming Home...
Dear Friends and Family:
As some of you know, March 2nd I started on as Pongo Poetry Project's Program Manager, responsible for our organization's programs, outreach, and training. A 25 year-old, Seattle-based non-profit, Pongo Poetry Project establishes writing projects in jails, psych. hospitals, and homeless shelters.
Between 2007 and 2010, I volunteered as a Poetry Mentor with Pongo, writing first with youth in foster care, then with students at CSTC, a Washington State psych. hospital for teens and children. I have long considered these experiences using Pongo's unique method of facilitating personal poetry as formative experiences that launched my teaching career.
Though taking on this new role has been a departure from my classroom-based former jobs, in many ways, its been a home-coming to an organization that's been the beating heart at the core of all my success teaching vulnerable populations.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic has made this new job especially challenging, I would like to share some of the successes I've had and ask for your support.
Pongo's Pivot to Online Services during the Coronavirus
In three months, I've helped our organization maintain service delivery, moving our poetry writing workshops and professional training offerings temporarily online with some exciting results.
May 16th, I facilitated an all-day online training of Pongo's methods via Zoom. We had 26 participants join our Zoom room. Participants hailed from various locales including Whidbey Island, Oregon, California, Idaho, Minnesota, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Nairobi, Kenya. Post-training, 100% rated the training as excellent or very good.
June 1st, I helped Pongo complete the Spring quarter of its 2019-2020 residency at CSTC, the psych. hospital. We did 9 online sessions, wrote poetry with 20 youth, creating 58 original poems. We finished with an Online Finale on Zoom. Over 30 staff members (teachers, therapists, administrators) attended and twenty-four 10 to 18 year-olds read poetry on a range of topics including identity, anxiety, depression, loss, abandonment, neglect, addiction, and sexual assault.
June 6th, I ran a training on UCLArts and Healing's HOPE series via Zoom with 68 registrants. The poetry writing exercise culminated in two women of color sharing poems and experiences about exposure to violence as a result of oppression.
In between, I've posted three previous years of poetry facilitated with youth in King County Juvenile Detention under the following titles on our website:
My Backpack of Pain (2018-2019)
Nobody Knows My Name (2017-18)
Until Life is Beautiful Once More... (2016-17)
As a read through these poems will show, my position gives me the unique opportunity to truly listen to young people living difficult lives. A majority of our young poets in detention are youth of color whose "personal traumas have been cooked in the stew of racial injustice", as Pongo's Founder Richard Gold writes. This racial injustice is alive and well in the United States, as these last few weeks have shown. Current events have strengthened my resolve to continue helping Pongo provide a platform for voices marginalized by social inequalities disproportionately affecting minority communities, particularly those of Black and Brown people.
Join me and Pongo's mission by:
signing up for our Newsletter or
donating
Thank you for your continued love and support.
