Toby’s Song

The first thing you notice about him is his fantastic grin. The smile spreads from ear to ear and his eyes light up with an internally-generated joy, combined with a healthy dose of mischief. Of course, he’s about thirteen years old, which is probably the most prolific mischief-making time in a young boy’s life. Looking at this glowing child it’s hard to imagine that his life has been deeply marked with suffering.

I’m going to call him Toby; I don’t want to use his real name because we need to protect his privacy. He’s in foster care at the Whaley Children’s Center in downtown Flint, Michigan. He stays in a nearby group home and goes to school in a tidy, well-organized facility nestled next to a hospital, with a welcoming campus and an incredibly loving and supportive staff.  (more…)

Supporter Profile – Grant Drake

Dr. Grant Drake has spent a lifetime helping people recover from trauma. He became interested in psychology as an undergraduate, and while at Yale Medical School he decided to go into psychiatry, completing his psychiatric training at the University of Michigan. Starting his career in community mental health, Dr. Drake also spent three years working with veterans at the VA. During this time he treated many PTSD survivors, participating in new concepts of group treatment pioneered at the VA by a University of Michigan psychiatrist.

Dr. Drake has been on the Lost Voices Board of Directors for about six years. Asked about his insight into the process, he said, “Lost Voices presents a very powerful way to help troubled kids. These young boys and girls are frozen in their ability to trust anyone, even themselves. They have trouble opening up to their therapists. In the case of these kids, the traumas are so deep, multiple, and long-term that they are even more frozen. Mike and his teams harness the power of the group, fostering collaboration through music. The musicians collaborate with the kids, and the kids collaborate with each other.”   (more…)

Lost Voices and Moments of Change

By Christin Perry-Michalik

“Moments of Change”-  We feel them in different environments and recognize the feeling of things shifting when change happens.   New research in the journal Frontiers in Psychology carried out by Professor Jorg Fachner and Dr. Clemens Maidhof of Anglia Ruskin University is shedding scientific light into what therapists have felt for decades.  “Moments of Change” happen when therapist and patient are connected and they feel in sync with each other.  Light bulb moments happen, and then change occurs.  EEGs (electroencephalograms) are showing that electrical signals in the brains of music therapists and patients sync together at the same moment that both later identified as the time in the session when therapy was really working.  This new research gives tangible evidence of these moments of connection and this change that is experienced in the brain and can actually be seen in the data.   (more…)

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Don Soenen is a man who stands out in a crowd. He’s an engineer, a highly successful entrepreneur, a car collector, a champion race car driver, and a noted philanthropist. He’s the president of the Plymouth Arts and Recreational Center, or PARC. He’s also a member of the Lost Voices Board of Directors, and here’s what he has to say about that:

What was your first impression of Lost Voices?

“I’ve been involved with a lot of nonprofits for a lot of years. The first time I saw a Lost Voices concert, I was just blown away by the commitment, the passionate feeling, and the focus of Lost Voices, both the musicians who work directly with the kids, and their supporters. And when I saw some of the kids who were in the program pouring out their hearts on the stage, I realized that I was witnessing those children healing and growing right in front of us.” (more…)

We recently conducted our first Lost Voices program at the Whaley Children’s Center in Flint, Michigan. Here is a little bit of background information on this wonderful facility, abstracted from their Website.

In 1882, a young boy named Donald Whaley passed away from diphtheria at the age of 10. While sorting through the child’s possessions after his death, his parents, Robert H. Whaley and Mary McFarlan Whaley, found a jar of coins Donald had been saving to donate to the children less fortunate than himself living in an orphanage in Detroit. 40 years later Robert and Mary had secured enough wealth to bequeath the funds to establish, in 1922, the Donald M. Whaley Memorial Home. (more…)

Here I sit on Christmas day, feeling well-fed, lazy, and blessed. Instead of watching play-by-play coverage of the ongoing dumpster fire in Washington, DC, I have the Vince Guaraldi Trio on the stereo playing all the cuts from the Charlie Brown Christmas Songs. We fried a turkey, and it turned out to be the best one we’ve ever done. Yeah, I know, I always say that. But still…

I’m not sure why Christmas day feels like this, but it does. That mellow and reflective mood might be all about peace on earth and good will toward all men, or it might have something to do with all the turkey and Jamison. Either way, it’s pretty nice to spend a day just feeling good and thinking about the year gone by.

Back in November Kitty Donohoe, Reverend Robert Jones, and I spent a week writing songs with twenty teenage girls at Vista Maria. These young women are in foster care at Vista because their lives have been scarred by abuse, neglect, violence, and addiction in the outside world. Quite a few of them were trapped in the horror of modern slavery known as  human trafficking. At the end of the week we all went “on stage” in a beautiful chapel on the Vista Maria campus and performed our work.

Then last Friday Kitty, Robert, and I went to Vista Maria to eat pizza and sing a few songs with our girls. We also surprised them with Christmas stockings that were put together by a friend’s church group. Each stocking was stuffed to the top with cookies, candy, gloves, holiday socks, and other wonders, topped off with the CD of their performance at the Lost Voices concert.

You might think that being around those kids is a sad thing. Anyone who knows me at all has seen me get emotional when I talk about them. But I can honestly tell you that those children are among the best things that have ever come into my life, and that’s precisely where all that emotion comes from. Watching the girls’ faces as they dug down into those Christmas stockings, catalogued their treasures, then traded gloves for Pringles and cookies for socks was exactly the same as watching my six year-old granddaughter. For that moment, all the shadows in their lives dissolved, and they were simply little girls.

Most of you reading this have raised or are raising children. Many of us have grandchildren. I can even squint hard and vaguely remember being a child myself. In any case, I think we can all agree that navigating the road from infant to adult is not always easy, even in the best of circumstances. So watching the courage of the kids I work with as they struggle to understand and cope with a version of the world that should never exist for anyone, especially a child, is a truly amazing thing. 

Sitting here with my thoughts and my tiny snifter of Irish whiskey, I feel like I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. I have an amazing family, a wonderful home, and pretty much all the stuff a guy could want. And I am incredibly blessed to have those Lost Voices kids in my life.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

By Sharon Tse

In less than the time it takes to finish your cup of coffee, the 2-minute Eye on Detroit piece that aired recently on CBS captures the essence of what Lost Voices is all about – giving a voice to kids who have been abused, neglected, trafficked and marginalized in ways that are unthinkable for most of us.

You may think these kids have little to do with you, or your own children. But there’s a much finer line between them – between any of us – than you may realize. I look at those kids, and I know they could easily be me.  The difference is actually pretty easy to explain: I had people around me who showed me they cared. Who spent time with me. Who helped me see that I could make different choices. And that I was worth making those choices. (more…)

In 2006, a friend asked me to speak at Career Day at the school where she taught. At the time I was writing a syndicated humor column, and apparently she thought the kids might be interested in learning what it was like to write sophomoric jokes for a living.

What made these kids unusual that they were locked up. They were male juvenile offenders at the WJ Maxey Boys Training School in Whitmore Lake, MI. (more…)

Ypsilanti, MI – In recognition of Human Trafficking Awareness Month, the EMU Student Group Unmasked is partnering with MAP (Michigan Abolitionist Project-Ann Arbor), SOAP Washtenaw (Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution), and Lost Voices to bring you an afternoon of music and information about this endemic problem and how we can fight back against it. (more…)