Just inside A Place to Be’s new 7,500 square foot facility in the Village at Leesburg hangs a sculpture of fluffy white clouds. It’s as good a metaphor as any for how excited everyone is to welcome clients to the non-profit’s new program and performance center. There’s more art coming including a mural by Penny Hauffe; new instruments are poised for play, and the in-house Mars-Schmidt Theater is ready to host around 100 patrons for each of five performances of The Snow Monster children’s production in early December. A ribbon-cutting set for November 8 will actually be preceded by a Halloween themed opener.
In short, there’s never a wasted moment for the 13-year-old program, and its staff has grown to 25 providers, many drawn from the organization’s nationally recognized internship program with more than a dozen universities. Its therapists touch in the neighborhood of 400 clients a week, some multiple times per week, and its partnerships expand the program’s reach far beyond county boundaries. A group from Makom (https://www.makomlife.org/), which helps young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities learn social skills in Rockville, Maryland, traveled to the new facility to enjoy a singing session the day we visited. A Place to Be also works with The Arc of Loudoun, Jill’s House, Grafton, and many other organizations. The need, in short, is great; its clients number in the thousands, and its productions, which touch many family members and others in community outreach, is in the tens of thousands.
Co-founder and Community Director Kim Tapper, MS, PCC, CTP, explains that all of A Place to Be’s children or family theater productions are threefold in nature. “Every show has some kind of therapeutic theme. In The Snow Monster, a young man who has been kicked out of several foster families learns how to cope with anger.” How to cope with rejection and bullying and how to show empathy for others are behaviors baked into the plot. The second purpose is to create a space for clients to participate to give them the experience of performing. In the October show, for example, there were parts for non-verbal clients who use various devices to communicate. And, finally, the performances themselves create the opportunity for people to be seen in a way they aren’t normally. “It creates confidence and high motivation to work towards a project in collaboration with others, navigating the skills they need in real life.”
The impact of all these efforts ultimately is joy. Says Kim, “I would say the arts overall are really windows to our soul. First of all, it's so cliche but really true – It opens up a place of expression and it helps us define our own sense of humanity. So, whether you're an audience member, maybe shifting your perspective about somebody with a disability or what they're capable of, or you're just experiencing joy through the notes of a song, those are the most human elements we offer one another.”
She added, “All of the arts really have this opportunity to uplift and to connect us beyond words and beyond our challenges – it’s something that just moves your soul. The three anchor components that we hope every single person feels no matter why they came here is a sense of community – that they're actually part of something – a sense of belonging – that they matter and they have value – and a sense of hope. A lot of the folks we see with disabilities and medical challenges and mental health issues experience a deep loss of community. There's a lot of isolation. There's rarely a sense of belonging to anything. And there's not a whole lot of hope sometimes. So that's our real purpose: to shift the landscape of their lives.”
While music therapy underlies most of A Place to Be’s work, there’s also dance, movement, the visual arts, theater, drama, poetry and writing too. Kim herself was a professional dancer before discovering music therapy. “Most of our staff are clinical board-certified arts therapists. Clinically, they’ve been trained as therapists, but they’re using the mediums of music or drama to work on an individual’s goals and objectives. The arts often kind of disguise the therapy so it just looks like a lot of fun. But everyone here is working on something. They’re working on communication or speech, sensor integration, or making friends and relationship building. For many of our folks that is the really challenging part that goes along with their various diagnoses.”
“In the broadest stroke we’re helping individuals to lead their best lives,” she concludes. The science behind music therapy stems from the fact that, “music lights up both sides of the brain at the same time, which nothing else really does.” Their therapists’ success with clients has led them into the Inova Hospital system, working with patients from the Neonatal Intensive Care unit to pain management, anxiety, disorientation, stress, brain injury all the way to end of life/hospice situations. There are even two brain injury choirs.
Support for the facility comes via a mixed model of pay for services – largely offset by financial aid – community grants, foundations and individual donations. Its commitment to community doesn’t stop with its clients; most Loudoun residents learn about its programs through a children’s theater production that may have been performed in their school. That’s fitting, given that Kim met co-founder Tom Sweitzer when he was teaching theater at The Hill School and booked Kim’s dance company for a performance. The school needed a choreographer for its next children’s show and Kim got the job. Both shared backgrounds where their fathers overcame serious disabilities. Both shared professional success in their artistic careers, but thought the arts could do much more to help others.
Their first non-profit collaboration helped teens in the arts, helping them “find their voices,” as Kim puts it. “That was the warm up to this place.” Both understood how to put together performances and how to work with children. Each developed specialties in running the business. Then, as it grew, handed administration off to others like Executive Director Dr. Judy Hanley, who joined the organization a year and a half ago. With a Ph.D. in child development with a specialization in brain development, as well as 23 years in non-profit leadership, she is certainly prepared for the job, but even she was surprised by the impact of music therapy on A Place to Be’s clients. “I had a mother tell me that in 34 years, she’s never seen the kind of impact that we’ve had in the last three months.” She advises anyone interested in learning more about music therapy to watch the documentary “Music Got Me Here,” a documentary on AppleTV, iTunes and Amazon.
Both Kim and Judy commented that what makes the new space special is its ability to bring people who typically lead their lives out of sight into the community’s town square. Says Kim, “I hope this space can provide a respite from a world that is so focused on pain and negativity and loneliness. The world is in desperate need of things, places, messages and people that remind us what it means to be human and that there's something bigger than ourselves.”
Want to help? Donations are always welcome and you can find tickets to their productions as well at their website https://aplacetobeva.org/. The Loudoun County Social Collective (LoCoSoCo) also has made the charity the beneficiary of its Third Annual Christmas Tea December 5th, and sponsorships are welcome. See: https://thesocialcollectives.org/ for information.