West Newsmagazine 11-14-18

More documents

Recommendations

Info

16 I COVER STORY I November 14, 2018 WEST NEWSMAGAZINE @WESTNEWSMAG WESTNEWSMAGAZINE.COM The Art of Sobriety Nonprofit helps teens, young adults creatively battle addiction By JESSICA MESZAROS Trading drugs and alcohol for paintbrushes and musical instruments – that’s what one local organization is encouraging in its fight to stem the tide of teenage substance abuse and self-harm. Kathie Thomas, a Chesterfield resident and innovation business consultant, is the founder and president of Hope Creates. The nonprofit arts program was created to help local teens and young adults obtain sobriety and recovery by providing them with creative opportunities, including painting, improvisational theater, tie-dye, pottery, fiber artistry, music and more. “If you’re going to take drugs, cutting or alcohol away from a kid, and that’s the only thing that made them feel like they had any control over their life or their world or their pain, then you have to give them something back,” Thomas said. Through Hope Creates, teens and young adults create original works of art, receive one-on-one coaching and then participate in gallery shows and concerts across the community. Recently, the nonprofit held its third annual “Don’t Quit Before The Miracle: An Expressive Arts Exhibition” on Oct. 21 at .ZACK, the Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s multi-use arts facility. Each participant must be one year sober to showcase their work – though they can participate in creation events at any time during their sobriety. Pieces at the exhibition are priced for individual sale with the funds going toward future Hope Creates events. “It’s a program that gives kids experience as both artists and entrepreneurs,” Thomas said. “It pretty much pays for itself, but the goal isn’t so much the revenue generation as it is the programming, the experiences and the realizations of self-worth, value and a sense of pride.” The positive feedback doesn’t just come from exhibition attendees. Musician and artist Adam D. returned to the St. Louis area from Colorado when he was about three months sober. He originally participated in the creation of physical art but now he plays music and has performed concerts at multiple Hope Creates events. Most recently, he played original music at a 2018 National Council for Alcohol and Drug Abuse [NCADA] event in which Hopes Creates participated. “With getting sober, the biggest thing is that if you’re not having more fun being sober than you were when you were using, you’re usually not going to stay sober, and that’s what Hope Creates has really done for me,” Adam said. “It’s given me a place to express my music, and have a place and outlet for that. It’s been really cool because, for my entire life, I’ve wanted to do something with my music. Now, I’m getting more and more opportunities with Hope Creates, and at the same time, helping to support the sober community.” According to Thomas, 36 artists participated in the 2019 exhibition. She said their stories are “tremendous.” Pieces from the “Don’t Quit Before The Miracle: An Expressive Arts Exhibition” in 2017 at .ZACK [Hope Creates photo] “Grandmothers were there saying, ‘I’m so proud of my grandson, and all these kids,’” Thomas shared. “One young man said he never thought he’d be good at photography, because he was into sports, and then once he got into drugs, all he cared about was drugs. Now, he’s a photographer and a painter and really thriving.” To provide structured time in which the artists create their art pieces, practice music and prepare for upcoming exhibitions, Hope Creates hosts community creation events. The program had 17 creation events and six gallery exhibitions last year and also provided recovery community art projects, art creation workshop opportunities, dedicated studio time, internships and mentoring programs for expressive arts and entrepreneurialism. Lexy A., who has been sober since October 2015, has been involved with Hope Creates for about a year. She heard about the program in one of her art classes at her school, where she is majoring in environmental science and minoring in ceramic pottery. “Ever since then, I’ve been going to the community creation events,” Lexy said. “I’ve even been able to hold a leadership role in teaching one of the community creation events and served as a summer intern for the organization. “I was able to start learning the business side of a nonprofit entity and really just help out with setting up these exhibits and kind of being a facilitator of, basically, a nonprofit that runs on donations, setting up a database in order to reach out to people, things like that,” she said of her internship. An artist with Hope Creates makes a piece at a community creation event in Overland. [Hope Creates photo] Creating hope “It’s personal,” Thomas said of her desire to found Hope Creates. “One of my kids is a recovering addict.” During those helpless days of her daughter’s addiction, Thomas turned toward art as a coping mechanism for herself; later, she saw the benefits of it for others. “I’m a graphic designer and innovation consultant, so art is part of who I am,” Thomas said. “I turned to it. I started making large, black and white landscapes or abstract collages just to vent and to feel like I had control over something. It was therapeutic, it was meditative, and at the end, there was something beautiful that was some kind of expression of what I was feeling – but it wasn’t toxic anymore. “Creation, literally, is the opposite of self-destruction ... creation can be clean and sober and enjoyable.” Most of the artists in the Hope Creates program agree with Thomas. The program has a 93-percent success rate compared to a national success rate of 15 percent for similar programs. Thomas credits both the process of creating something meaningful and the support of the community. “You can’t stay sober alone,” Lexy said. “Isolation is what takes us back out there into wanting to drink and use, because we don’t feel like we’re a part of something. With Hopes Creates, we do feel like we’re part of something. And in having that cohesive network, there’s always somebody I can turn to, and I feel comfortable talking about my problems to these people.” According to the NCADA, a recordbreaking 760 people died as the result of opioid abuse in the St. Louis region in 2017. “People don’t know that in 2016 we lost more people than we lost in the 10-year Vietnam War,” Thomas said of opioid deaths. “People don’t know that in 2017 we lost 24 times the number of people we lost on 9/11, for which we went to war. This year, we’re going to lose 76,600 people or more; we could fill the [Enterprise Center] four times with the bodies. “We lose two [people] in St. Louis every single day, and we lose 200 in the United States every single day ... The community needs to know.” Lexy said the goal of Hope Creates events is to create a mind-shift about the stigma of addiction. “The stigma about people suffering from addiction is that they’re on the fringe of society and that they don’t have anything else to offer. Unless someone has somebody who is close to them who is dealing with such a thing, most people view it as, ‘they have nothing to offer,’” Lexy said. “I think because we have these galleries and we are showing these beautiful pieces of art and we’re able to tell people our stories, that definitely induces a mind shift and changes the way the community views people like us.” “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety,” Thomas said. “Sobriety is a necessity … The opposite of addiction is community. If you feel that you are connected to people who will give you unconditional love and accountability, and really get you and care about you, don’t enable you and really support you, that is what makes sobriety stick in most cases.” For more information or to donate to Hope Creates, visit hopecreates.org.
FACEBOOK.COM/WESTNEWSMAGAZINE WESTNEWSMAGAZINE.COM November 14, 2018 WEST NEWSMAGAZINE I HEALTH I 17 New research shows that testing young dogs’ cognitive abilities may help to more quickly identify the best potential service animals. health capsules By LISA RUSSELL Sniffing out the best assistance dogs The demand for service dogs is increasing rapidly in the U.S. Due to the many challenges involved with identifying and training these specialized dogs, however, that demand greatly exceeds the current supply. Only about 50 percent of dogs that start a training program to become assistance animals will successfully complete it. As a result, the wait time to receive a trained assistance dog can be up to two years. While a dog’s physical characteristics and temperament have traditionally been the top priorities when evaluating potential assistance dogs, University of Arizona researchers recently looked at whether cognitive ability also is a good predictor of a dog’s success as a service animal – before the long and expensive training process begins. “People have really focused on temperament and how reactive a dog is to certain things in the environment,” said Evan MacLean, assistant professor in the UA School of Anthropology. “What we were interested in was the fact that these dogs also face cognitive challenges. They have to learn all these things in the course of their training, and they have to be able to flexibly solve problems when things go wrong.” The study focused on both assistance dogs in training for people with disabilities, and explosive detection dogs being trained to work for the U.S. Navy. MacLean and his colleagues looked at the performance of both types of dogs on 25 different cognitive measures by using a battery of gamebased tests, like hiding and finding objects and other forms of canine play. Dogs in the study were considered “successful” based on whether or not they ultimately graduated from the training. Through cognitive testing, MacLean and his colleagues were able to predict the top 25 percent of graduates with 86 percent accuracy. They also found that different sets of skills predict whether a dog will be a good detection dog or a good assistance dog. In assistance dogs, social skills such as the ability to pay close attention to and maintain eye contact with humans were especially important. In detection dogs, good short-term memory and sensitivity to human body language were the best predictors of success. The study’s findings suggest that cognition is an important factor, alongside temperament and physical traits, in predicting working dog success. If organizations that train dogs could better predict which dogs are most worth the investment, it would not only help ensure that people in need get the right dogs faster, but tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary training costs could be saved, MacLean said. On the calendar St. Luke’s Hospital offers cholesterol and glucose wellness screenings on Friday, Nov. 16 from 7-10:30 a.m. at St. Luke’s Resource Center, 101 St. Luke’s Center Drive in Chesterfield. Screenings include cholesterol and glucose numbers along with a one-on-one consultation with a registered nurse/health coach, which includes blood pressure and body composition measurement. A 10- to 12-hour fast and advance appointments are required. The fee for these screenings is $20, with an optional A1C finger stick test [for those at risk for Type 2 diabetes] available for an additional $12. Appointments are limited and fill quickly. To register, visit stlukes-stl.com. • • • BJC St. Louis Children’s Hospital sponsors a Staying Home Alone course on Wednesday, Nov. 28 from 6:30-8 p.m. at the Wildwood Municipal Building, 16860 Main St. in Wildwood, in the City Council chambers. This class is designed for parents and children together, and will help determine a child’s readiness physically, mentally, socially and emotionally to stay home alone. The class fee is $25 per family [provide the names of all family members attending]. To register, call (314) 454-5437. H NEST JUN K REMOVAL Locally Owned & Operated • Residential or Commercial Furniture • Appliances • Electronics • Big TV’s Fences • Decks • Trampolines • Swing Sets Above Ground Pools • Sheds • Railroad Ties Exercise Equipment • Garage/Basement Clean Out Pool Tables • Hot Tubs • Remodeling Debris Paint • Estate Clean Out • Books ASK US ABOUT FREE BOOK PICKUP WITH SERVICE $ 25 OFF Any Pick-Up Expires 2-28-19 cannot be combined with other offers H NEST JUNK REMOVAL Large Screen TV Pick-Up (Up to 65” - includes disposal fee) $ 99 (Each additional TV $50) Expires 2-28-19 cannot be combined with other offers H NEST JUNK REMOVAL $ 50 OFF Hot Tub Removal Expires 2-28-19 cannot be combined with other offers H NEST JUNK REMOVAL 314-312-1077 www.honestjunk.com FREE Estimates by Phone or On Site Call TODAY and we’ll HAUL it AWAY
Page 1 and 2: Vol. 23 No. 31 • November 14, 201
Page 3 and 4: FACEBOOK.COM/WESTNEWSMAGAZINE WESTN
Page 13 and 14: 2018 HOLIDAY WISHBOOK A Special Adv
Page 23 and 24: TM TM FACEBOOK.COM/WESTNEWSMAGAZINE
Page 27 and 28: WAREHOUSE MOVING SALE LOWEST PRICES
Page 31: FACEBOOK.COM/WESTNEWSMAGAZINE WESTN
Page 39: FACEBOOK.COM/WESTNEWSMAGAZINE WESTN

West Newsmagazine 11-14-18

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?