"I draw what I feel."

Dr. Chapman is late for a meeting. That shouldn’t be a big deal—when you run a social services agency with 16 programs in nine locations, things come up. A funder needs an answer right away. A child gets in a fight at school. Power goes out at the shelter. 

But the boys in the Greentree Adolescent Program (GAP) are antsy. They don’t like waiting. They would rather be surfing the Internet or playing basketball in the Youth Activities Center than waiting for the Executive Director to talk to them about a charity auction. For some of them, waiting is a trigger. They have waited for people in the past, loved ones who said they were coming back but never returned. Many are here because their families couldn’t care for them. One boy was found wandering alone when he was two years old and has no memory of his biological parents. Another teen was removed from his mother’s home at the age of four because the woman was addicted to drugs; he doesn’t know his father’s name. 

A simple change of plans can set these boys off—something Chapman, an expert in child welfare, understands.  

“Let me ask you something: Have you ever had an experience where someone disappoints you, where they say they don’t have time for you and they’ll get to you when they can?” she asks when she arrives. 

Yes, they say. They have. 

“How does that make you feel?”

Mad. Unimportant. 

Chapman tells the boys she had a last-minute deadline to meet involving funding for the GAP program. A crisis with a client earlier in the day had gotten her off schedule. 

“I want you to know, from my heart, that I would never make you wait if I didn’t have to,” she says. “I was finishing something critical for GAP. I apologize for being late.” 

Dinner arrives from the kitchen downstairs—chicken sandwiches and baked potato wedges—so the boys fill their plates and sit down. Chapman is here to ask them to contribute artwork for the 11th Annual Art & Soul Charity Auction, and she knows she will have better luck if they’ve eaten. She’s here to inspire them. Every year, youth from the GAP program spend six-to-eight weeks working on an art project to sell at the live auction. The money they raise goes towards a summer trip or equipment for the Youth Activities Center. One painting by a GAP artist sold for $1800.  

 “The fact that you’re living here means you’ve had some barriers growing up, right?” Chapman says. “It may be your family. It may be your behavior. It may be the neighborhood you came from.”

She asks the youth how they might express themselves artistically. They come from a different world than many of their peers at a local Bethesda high school: Some have spent time in juvenile detention. They have attended funerals of friends their own age and visited parents in prison.

“I draw what I feel,” says a 16-year-old. 

They talk about what might come through on paper—anger, fear, happiness—and how it feels to get those emotions out. 

“It calms me down,” one youth says. 

“Comforts me,” says another.

“You are survivors,” Chapman says. “But you are more than what has happened to you, though, and art can help you put your journey in perspective so you don’t get stuck.”

One by one, the boys raise their hands to sign up for Wednesday evening art classes, where they’ll paint a piece to auction off at Art & Soul. Class Acts Arts, a nonprofit that provides arts programming to at-risk youth, started hosting sessions for the boys three weeks ago, but only a few showed up.  

That will change now, Chapman hopes. They needed a pep talk. They needed to understand why art matters, how it can help them cope.

“Goodnight, gentlemen,” she says. Like every spring before Art & Soul, she’s anxious to see what the boys come up with. At the first art class, when asked to illustrate their lives in a small circle, one teen drew an infinity symbol with the face of a man screaming. He wouldn’t tell anyone what the picture meant. But he knew.

For information about NCCF’s 11th Annual Art & Soul Charity Auction, please visit http://www.nccf-cares.org/art-and-soul/.