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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…)

My life changed in the span of an hour.  It was the first time I witnessed youth in a Lost Voices program sing their songs and tell their stories.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.  They sang of anger, hurt, sadness, and abuse, and they had the courage, many times while fighting back tears, to sing and to share their stories.

On Saturday, June 17, Lost Voices is hosting a special concert at the PARC in downtown Plymouth.  We are calling this show “Lost Voices of Trafficked Kids: A Concert.” (more…)

We don’t know their stories, but each girl has one. They are tall and short, thin and not-so-thin, brash and reserved. Some of them show a sadness in their eyes deeper than you want to imagine, and others wear a mask that most of the world will never penetrate.

And they are children.

(more…)

This is a column I wrote a few years ago about the documentary I made, Young Poet Incarcerated, which led directly to the founding of Lost Voices…

It was a pretty good line in a really good poem, entitled “Look At Me,” by a seventeen year old African-American poet named Donald. This young man was theoretically every bit as dangerous as he was gifted; he was incarcerated in the WJ Maxey Boys Training School as a violent offender.

Who’d have thought good crops
Could come from a bad seed?

(more…)

You can hear it in their voices, sometimes off-key, sometimes wobbling with a tremolo of fear, sometimes styled after some singer they have long admired. You can hear it through the giggling bravado of children struggling to show a veil of courage on stage in front of their peers. You can hear it in the words that they would never dare say in any other place or time, words that express feelings lurking in the deepest recesses of their not-quite-adult souls.

It’s the sound of young hearts crying for help.

(more…)