The DrawBridge art program works with homeless children. But it’s not interested in helping them.
DrawBridge classes are held weekly in homeless shelters, schools and community centers. Usually a staff member (who might be a former DrawBridge client) supervises as two or more volunteers work with the children.
“If a kid doesn’t want to paint or draw, that’s also OK,” said Gloria Simoneaux, executive director of DrawBridge. “We create an environment that’s very safe for the kids. We’re accepting and encouraging. We aren’t `the experts.’ For many of the kids, it’s the first really healthy experience with an adult they’ve ever had. And also, we show up. Week after week after week. Even in lives that have no consistency or predictability, this is one thing that is predictable.
“Sometimes people call up and say, `I want to help needy people.’ We usually send them somewhere else. We don’t like to use the word `help.’ This is about being with kids, listening to kids and really showing up.”
Jeffery Haines, a developmentally delayed teenager, began his participation with DrawBridge almost a decade ago. His early paintings are dark and disturbing, full of images of dead children, his father’s abuse of his mother and his father in jail. Over the years, his artwork has changed dramatically, and he has developed into a gifted painter.
A number of his works are part of DrawBridge’s exhibition, “Through Our Eyes,” which is at Harvard University and will move to the International Children’s Art Museum in San Francisco in May.
Jeffery is a high school senior and a part-time DrawBridge staff member.
Debora Haines, Jeffery’s mother, has been homeless twice. The first time, 10 years ago, she was living in a shelter with her three children, aged 6, 7 and 8.
“I heard about free art classes, and I sent my kids,” Haines said. “Jeffery took to it right away. It was a way for him to get a lot of his feelings out.”
Haines now lives with her children in Santa Rosa, Calif., and does childcare in her home.
“When you’re homeless, it’s hard to feel safe,” Haines said. “It’s hard not knowing what’s going to happen. DrawBridge was structured, and the fact that they were there every week was a help. Some people and some agencies make you feel uncomfortable, but Gloria and DrawBridge always made people feel comfortable. If I’d never met Gloria, I don’t know what I would have done.
“Jeffery still paints every day. It’s his future. He says, `I am an artist.’ “
DrawBridge calls its work “expressive arts.” It’s not exactly arts therapy, which is done by trained therapists, usually in institutional environments. Program director Ellen Rodgers defined it as “art in which expression happens.” It’s non-directed, and not structured like an art class, so the children do whatever they like.
“For us, every single mark a kid puts on a piece of paper is significant and has value, even if it’s just a single mark,” Simoneaux said.
Simoneaux has almost an evangelical fervor about the work she does, blended with a distinctly Northern California “no expectations” acceptance of its limitations.
“For me this is spiritual work, and that’s about accepting everyone where they’re at,” she said.
That means accepting that most of the Drawbridge kids are not going to make dramatic escapes from poverty or win Ivy League scholarships. It is common for homeless children to become homeless adults. And DrawBridge sometimes encounters former clients with children of their own, living in shelters.
“It’s really hard for these kids to break the cycle of poverty,” Simoneaux said. “It’s hard for them to take advantage of opportunities. We offer them so many opportunities, and at the last minute, so many of them sabotage themselves.”
Simoneaux has worked with some children for 10 years and has watched them grow into teenagers and young adults. She has helped arrange jobs and scholarships, only to see them fall through, frequently at the last moment, because the youths were unable or unwilling to follow through.
“They’re great kids, but they don’t know how to make the next step,” she said. “These kids have a hard time leaving the comfort of what they know. They almost see it as a betrayal of the people they know. It’s hard to go into the unknown.
“I feel my job is to just keep loving them. I let them know when they do something that doesn’t work for me, but they know they have another chance when they’re ready. I have to have — I do have — a very deep faith that I can’t push it. I can’t make it happen. It’s their choice and so that helps me somehow. I can offer but I can’t make it happen.”
Some children are able to overcome the trauma of homelessness. Rickii Sesler, a high school senior, was a homeless 5th grader living in the Hamilton Family Center in San Francisco when she started participating with DrawBridge. She was one of the first DrawBridge kids.
“It was something that could take me away from all the stress,” Rickii said. “We could get away from the shelter and take little trips. Even if it was around the corner, it was a way for me to forget the stress of living in the shelter.”
DrawBridge has its roots in the early ’80s, when Simoneaux worked as an arts therapist at the Children’s Cancer Research Center in San Francisco. In her eight years there, she found that art offered a way for many of her clients to express what they couldn’t say in words: what it’s like to be kid with cancer.
Several years later, after she had left the hospital, Simoneaux realized that expressive arts could be as valuable to emotionally traumatized children as it was to sick children.
She contacted the Hamilton Family Center in the Haight district, San Francisco’s only emergency family shelter at the time.
“I called and told them I’d worked for eight years with kids with cancer and was looking for another venue, another place to use my skills. I said I wanted to do a pilot project at the shelter and if you’d pay me $10 an hour for six hours a week, I can guarantee that I’ll get a grant in three months and put a real project in place. And without even meeting me, the guy on the phone said, `You’re hired. Come tomorrow.’ So I started.”
Simoneaux said she initially had a prejudice against poor or homeless people.
“I hadn’t realized it, but there was something in me that thought these kids might be a little less bright than other kids, or a little less everything, but they were extraordinary. I got really close really fast with a lot of the kids. After three months, I got a Rockefeller family grant for three years. I stayed at that one shelter for those three years. That first year I had one volunteer, then two. After two years, there were four.”
From its beginnings at the Hamilton shelter in 1989, DrawBridge has grown to include programs in 19 shelters and facilities in five Bay Area counties with more than 1,300 participants. There’s a paid staff of 14 and a volunteer corps of 60. DrawBridge has also become a model for programs in other cities. The first year’s budget was $13,000. The 1998 budget was $340,000.
Some of the artwork the children make helps pay for the program. DrawBridge offers a wide range of greeting cards and items such as tote bags that feature the children’s work, accounting for about 10 percent of DrawBridge’s budget last year.
DrawBridge’s offices are in the Canal district of San Rafael, a mostly Hispanic and low-income neighborhood in wealthy Marin County, north of San Francisco. Along with Simoneaux’s and Rodgers’ desks, the room is filled with tables, computers, floor-to-ceiling shelves of art supplies, files, office supplies and boxes of the greeting cards DrawBridge sells. There are battered futons in the corner, and a steady stream of visitors. Neighborhood children drop in to say hello or work on art projects, and Simoneaux’s large, curly-haired retriever wanders through the office or flops on the floor.
Simoneaux stays away from the politics of dealing with homelessness. She leaves the activism to others and concentrates on DrawBridge.
“My world is very small,” she said. “A lot of my friends are involved in lobbying and political changes, but I really don’t have time to know what’s going on, because I am so involved with the kid’s lives.”
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For more information, contact DrawBridge at P.O. Box 2698, San Rafael, CA 94912; 415-456-1269; arts4home@aol.com, or www.drawbridge.com. For a catalog of DrawBridge cards, call 888-743-4448.
