Stomping Grounds Literary Arts Initiative is launching the Paint The Light Poetry Campaign, a literary arts campaign for girls inside the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC). This is our newest push to expand access to arts education, mentorship, and healing for incarcerated youth.
Paint The Light is a poetry campaign for incarcerated youth who identify as girls. The goal is simple: to help young people explore the light within themselves and to write about the light within the communities that shaped them.
In this program, “light” becomes a metaphor for awareness and possibility. Words are our paintbrushes. Through spoken-word poetry, writing exercises, and guided group conversations, participants create poems that paint vivid images of their realities, in the spirit of both awareness and possibility. They write about the neighborhoods they come from, the systems they navigate, and the personal challenges they face. At the same time, they use writing to reclaim who they are, define themselves on their own terms, and write toward the futures they want.
Together, we write poems that shed light on systemic structures while grounding ourselves in self-definition and self-determination.
Outcomes:
Community Building – Learn key tools for supporting one another within a literary community.
Creative Writing – Create and have access to our culminating digital poetry book, Paint The Light.
Self-Care Playlist – Create and have access to our community self-care playlist.
While we are excited to bring new programming to JTDC, we need your support.
These funds will ensure consistent, high-quality programming and support the mentorship model that our students have come to depend on. With your help, we can deepen our impact at JTDC and continue to provide meaningful creative outlets during one of the most vulnerable periods in these young people’s lives.
We believe that creativity is a form of resistance and healing. By supporting, you’re helping us continue to unlock potential, shift narratives, and remind these young people that they are not forgotten.
Donate today and help us Paint The Light.