There is a wonderful annual event that happens every spring in our state called the Michigan Teen Conference. This is an amazing four-day conference for teens from all around the state who have been in foster care and are preparing for life on their own in the adult world. Organized by an initiative called Fostering Success Michigan, these young women and men interact with experts to learn about important life skills like budgeting and getting health care.

And thanks to Lost Voices, this year they had the chance to learn how to express themselves in song!

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By Grant Drake, MD
Lost Voices Board President

I want to call special attention to our recent Tom Saunders Memorial Concert for Lost Voices, performed this past April. It highlights how far Lost Voices has come in our 15 years and especially our advances in this last year dealing with the challenges posed by COVID-19.

This concert featured some of our original Lost Voices singer-songwriters, artists who pioneered our program and are still going strong for us. Josh White, Jr. worked alongside Founder Mike Ball when he developed the original workshops in 2006 at Maxey Boys Training School. Not long after that, Kitty Donohoe joined Mike at the Adrian Girls Training School. Annie Capps has been another one of our key workshop facilitators almost from the beginning, and along with husband Rod Capps they have become major boosters and Lost Voices concert performers.
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After what has seemed like endless months of interacting with the Lost Voices kids in little boxes on computer screens, we now have our entire team vaccinated against COVID-19 and ready to once again work with them in person. The month of August will see us at the Whaley Children’s Center in Flint, Wedgwood Christian Services in Grand Rapids, and a new facility to us, the Methodist Children’s Home Society in Redford.

During the months of isolation, the kids were remarkably resilient, and they completely embraced the technological work-arounds we came up with. Still, it will be amazing to be back in a room with them again! Just to remind of you of the complex blend of hope, confusion, anguish, and beauty of the kind of songs the kids come up with, here is a personal song written and sung with pride by a fourteen year-old boy when we were at Whaley  back in 2019:

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If you missed the Premiere, you can still watch it

Join Josh White, Jr., Kitty Donohoe, Annie & Rod Capps and Lost Voices founder Mike Ball on stage in a new Concert for Lost Voices. Presented in conjunction with the Trinity House Theatre, the evening pays loving tribute to our late Lost Voices president Tom Saunders. A dedicated supporter of Lost Voices and live music in general, Tom was taken from us nearly four years ago.

• Watch It On Facebook
• Watch it on the Trinity House YouTube Channel
• Watch it on the Lost Voices YouTube Channel

The concert is free for all, and donations will be gratefully accepted to support our work with the kids.

A Call-Out for Lost Voices

Over the years, one of the most gratifying things about our Lost Voices work has been the partnerships we’ve enjoyed with other organizations. In our last Lost Voices Newsletter we talked about working with District 6380 of Rotary International, Epic Races, and sixteen other mental health-related nonprofits in the E-Race the Stigma Mile-A-Day Marathon. This ongoing effort to stamp out the stigma attached to seeking help for mental health issues has not only been a wonderful success, it has also earned us a call-out from some really amazing Women from Michigan. Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Debbie Stabinow both found the time to support the Marathon, and to mention us!  (more…)

A Micro-History of Trauma Informed Care

If you spend any sort of time around the Lost Voices crew, you’re bound to hear the term “Trauma Informed Care.” When we’re feeling all official and governmental, we like to call it “TIC.” Either way, it’s one of the most basic principles behind what we do. The concept is that anyone who has experienced trauma is mentally and even physically changed by the experience, and there are very specific and beneficial ways to acknowledge and deal with that fact.

Lost Voices has been using the tools of Trauma Informed Care since our first session back in 2006. We nurtured a culture of non-judgmental freedom, a sort of semi-controlled chaos where the kids could say or do pretty much anything they felt. Our founder, Mike Ball, took this approach for no reason other than it seemed like the right thing to do.

The thing is, we had no idea that there was a name for what we were doing. (more…)

When the Healing Happens

We just finished up a Lost Voices program with a new group of young women, and like all of our programs, the results were life-changing. Even though we’re all still stuck in our little Zoom boxes on computer screens and iPads, the flow of trust and emotion was amazing.

The group song they came up with was powerful, but deceptively simple:

If I Could Ask You For Help

If I could ask you for help, would you give me your ear
If I could ask you for help, even though you’re not here
Facing my fears even though there are tears

You showed me love, even though you’re not here
You showed me trust, that shows me you care
I know it’s my time, to take my risk
And let you fly…

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Music as Medicine

I’m pretty sure that every musician knows, on some level, that music is one of the most healing things we can have in our lives. I can’t count the number of times, going back more than six decades, that I found a safe refuge for myself by picking up one of my instruments and making some noise. To this day I try to never be more than a few feet from a guitar. 

But I don’t think a lot of us realize how extensively the healing power of music has been studied by people in white lab coats who stick electrodes on your head and hook you to machines that beep and whir. Amy Biancolli, writing in the psychiatric Web magazine “Mad in America,” says that this is exactly the case. (more…)

Run for Lost Voices
(or maybe just walk)

We did it last fall, and we’re going to do it again!

Lost Voices is proud to be one of the seventeen mental health-oriented organizations chosen to benefit from the Ann Arbor Marathon in 2021. To kick things off this year, we’re participating in an Epic Races challenge to run, jog, or walk a mile a day for 26.2 days.

The Ann Arbor Marathon is dedicating profits to organizations like Lost Voices who help and support issues associated with mental health, and play an active role in reducing the stigma around mental illness.  (more…)

Ok, so the number one running joke right now is likely to involve some variation of putting 2020 behind us. If you have been in any sort of contact with the planet Earth during the past twelve months, I don’t need to bore you with a list of the reasons. 

But I do have to say that for Lost Voices it has not all been bad news. My Board of Directors asked me to put together a recap of the year for our annual meeting in November, and the exercise kind of opened my eyes. I thought I’d share a version of that report with all of you. (more…)