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Dear John, You don't know me yet but my name is Sandy Bishop Maynard, I am the founder and Director of the women's art therapy non profit, Beautifully Broken. Since it’s Giving Tuesday, I’m writing to tell you about what we do and all the women we've helped over the last seven years.
About fifteen years ago, I invited a group of women to my house for a knitting circle. We met once a month, and as time went on, we began to share our stories. We cried and we laughed, it was our ladies night.
I began to dream of a place where I could invite these women to be able to get away from their world as they knew it. I wanted to provide a way for them to be away from the dirt in their lives, for an hour or a day; a sanctuary away from hurt, fear, the media; a place where their minds could rest enough to be able to express their emotions by using art as a therapeutic avenue for healing.
With support from great people in my life, Beautifully Broken was birthed. Since 2016 we have embedded ourselves in halfway houses, women's shelters, and women's correctional facilities, to offer the women within them the opportunity to heal through art. |
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A few of the thousands of women whose lives were touched by art in 2023 with the help of Beautifully Broken.
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We focus on women who are hurting and heavy with their circumstances; women who have been through the kind of trauma that we don’t like to talk about ... the stuff we find hidden under the household “rug” or in the “closet”. Each one of us could reach back through the haze of secrecy and shame, and remember someone in our own circles who has been through trauma and pain. The circumstances vary, of course. Abuse, whether emotional or physical; rejection in every aspect of life’s relationships, from the very first time we hopped out of our cocoon to face this world.
It's my hope these women feel they have a safe place to come to, without the dirt of their world, or even the dust. I want them to find a new kind of magical “dust”, to enable them to not only pick their heads up, but to open their wings and fly!
We show these women that in their brokenness, they are beautiful individuals, who, because of their brokenness, can in turn help other women who are broken.
Since 2016 we have provided tens of thousands of women with art therapy that’s fostered growth and healing. We’ve set up groups at dozens of halfway houses, gone into prisons to teach art to incarcerated women, opened up our own studio, and have partnered with reentry organizations like the Women’s Bean Project, Second Chance Center, and The Empowerment Program to provide our services to marginalized and formerly incarcerated women returning to the workforce.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit us hard preventing us from entering prisons, and forcing many of the facilities we had been working with to close their doors, thereby depriving us of the revenue we needed to keep our studio open.
But we’ve come a long way since then, we have up a giant new studio space, re-launched our partnerships with organizations who had to pause our services due to pandemic social distancing like The Empowerment Program, and have been steadily growing the attendance of our weekly art therapy sessions.
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Thank you for your belief in the notion that through art anything is possible. Founder & Director Beautifully Broken |
