HeART Broken

Yesterday was the last day of an arts program I founded a year and a half  ago  at a residential treatment facility for teenage boys in a small town, literally in the middle of no where. These are kids that people didn’t deserve to have and  after a  lifetime of neglect, abuse and falling through the cracks of the system society wonders why they get in trouble. This facility has anywhere from a few to  18 months to undo the damage of what these boys’ so called families’ have done.

The program grew from 2 hours a week with 6 boys to two days a week with 19–one day with the kids and another preparing, fundraising, scheduling field trips and communityactivities, etc. to show the better side of life and why its worth the hard work they are asked to do in therapy and school and that they are worthy of the best life has to offer.

If you read the papers you know there’s not much money for programs like mine: You Gotta Have HeART. As a matter of fact I’ve been volunteering the past month while waiting for the parent organization to decide if they are going to pay for the program, I gave them 6 weeks notice and the boys 2 weeks notice so  as not to be another one who abandons them. (I’m still going to attend their program graduations and there are a couple of kids I’m working with on connecting with art schools) but yesterday was the official last day with the understanding that if they can find funding (approx. $16,000/year as is but we really need to accommodate the bigger group so ideally$32,000) I’ll be back.

I cleaned out the office, gave out new sketch books, pencils, graphite sticks, crayons and colored pencils, accepted a beautiful plaque, card and two very touching personal letters and drove off, HeART broken.

Happy Valentine’s Day–this is my first blog entry ever!

Never say never. I’ll never blog. I’ll never marry again. I’ll never live in the midwest. I’ll never live in a small town. I’ll never work for a program funded by grants. I’ll never…Oh well, it’s content for art so welcome to my first blog entry. VERY frustrating to learn how to maneuver around these pages.  I’m just afraid (not really) that I’m going to offend one of my nicer workshop attendees or customers who really doesn’t know me that well yet.  From what I understand you are not supposed to use curse words on here so that’s problem number two. Oy. Welcome to the 21st century.  They say (I don’t know who the f–k  see there I gothey are) that New Yorkers aren’t happy unless they have something to complain about so try what my art coach and friend Marie says: it;s some err… I forgot but it’s an unconditionally, total surrender kind of thing (I’ll check with her since it sounds so much nicer than my explanation of “your f–ked and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it so you might as well forgeddheboudit and go do something else.” Like blog.  Happy V.D (Valentine’s Day, you silly people.)