Check out this nice piece about Sabra's work in Voyager LA's, 'Shout Out LA' series. Photo: Bob Turton
Hi Sabra, how does your business help the community?
Creative Acts is an organization that seeks to transform urgent social justice issues through the revolutionary power of the Arts; to heal trauma, build community, raise power, and center the voices of those who are or have been incarcerated.
I have been working behind bars for 15 years, bringing in arts programming to those people for whom it has proved a lifeline, reconnecting them to themselves, each other and society. As an immigrant, woman of color and artist, one of the first things I noticed about America is how the Arts are sidelined as purely entertainment or for artists. What our work has shown me is that people who are from communities targeted for incarceration need the Arts as much, or more, as artists, and yet they mostly have had no access. It’s an equity issue. When our young people are living with daily violence, in food deserts where schools look like prisons, with high unemployment and under-investment, they are almost unanimously dealing with trauma. That causes them to “act out” which often gets them excluded from school and sends them to the streets, where their first arrest begins an often lifelong entanglement with the injustice system. Young people with trauma are unable to succeed in the very narrow way our education system allows, the Arts enables different avenues of learning and we find that when they have access they thrive, often doing better than children with a more stable upbringing. As many of my partners inside have said about our work, “If I had this at school, I wouldn’t be here now.”
The Arts heal, awaken and focus. When used to rehabilitate, the tools the Arts provide enable people to be ready to reenter after long prison sentences, become better parents, make different emotional choices, be better prepared for the work market and be ambassadors for the Arts.
The Arts can also help shape and change narratives, and with mass incarceration and a fatally flawed understanding of justice in this country, a broader and deeper understanding of the power of the Arts can be central to America’s desperately needed path to a truth and racial transformation process.
