One question people ask about our Lost Voices work is some variation of, “What is your success rate?” That question is both difficult to answer, and very easy to answer. First, I’ll tackle the hard part.
Any kind of therapeutic work can be really tough to measure objectively. There are countless things going on in anyone’s life that make their psychological health incredibly complicated. That’s especially true when you add years of unresolved trauma to the mix. A therapist works to a long term treatment plan, and has various tools to assess progress. But even in this sort of ongoing professional evaluation, real change in the client often goes beyond any of the numbers.
For the past few years we’ve been working with the CASCAID Group at the University of Michigan School of Nursing to develop ways to measure the effectiveness of our time with the kids. We gather information mostly through interviews with the youth in the program and with facility staff. This gives us valuable insight into how the Lost Voices experience is perceived. What we don’t get to do is follow the overall progress of the kids from day to day over a long period of time.
Now for the easy part. I can honestly say that our true success rate is 100%.
It’s important to understand that we are not therapists, and the Lost Voices experience is not a course of treatment. It’s a trauma informed intervention. We are with the kids for a brief, intentionally intense time, then we’re gone. Our goal is to help them find new ways to explore their feelings in a safe, non-judgmental atmosphere. Then we support their performance as they express those feelings to a supportive audience. After their Lost Voices time is over, they can go back to the therapist armed with new tools to help them move forward in the healing process.
What gives us that 100% success rate is the fact that every kid who goes through a week with us is changed by it. We can watch the evolution of their ideas throughout the week. We can hear the growing sense of confidence in their words and in their voices. We can see it in their eyes. We can share the giddy joy they feel when they take a bow and walk off that stage after pouring their hearts out to an audience who trades enthusiastic applause for the musical gift of some of their deepest feelings.
It’s clear to anyone who witnesses one of these Lost Voices concerts that the experience has planted a seed of self-worth in the kids. We’ve had some of our past participants reach out to us years later and tell us that their time on our stage was a pivotal point in turning their lives around. As for the ones we haven’t heard from, we have no way of knowing exactly how that seed is going to grow.
But we know it’s in there.
