Book of Dreams: Art classes provide healing, focus for women at Sacramento homeless shelter

Sacramentan Micaela Partida, 38, can recite all the facts that led her to endure homelessness for three years, but she struggles to put words together describing all the trauma she experienced.

“I suffered from a disability due to a car accident when I was a teenager,” she said. It left her hip and other parts of her left side permanently weakened, but she never let it get in the way of her ambition.

She obtained an associate degree in communications and worked at two well-known technology companies until her disability “got in the way” and she had to stop work.

She says she endured years of abuse from a former boyfriend and had to leave “after he pulled a gun on me.” More recently, she was living in her truck before getting into the Sacramento Meadowview Navigation Center for Women in south Sacramento, which opened in October and has served nearly 50 previously unsheltered women.

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The shelter put a roof over her head, she said, while enabling her to work with the center’s team to obtain permanent housing.

Part of the recovery process for Partida is an art class, sponsored by the center, that is helping her and others begin to process what they have been through.

She says one of her paintings, an 11-by-14-inch abstract entitled “Sacrifice,” especially speaks for her.

“Sacrifice means everything I have had to give up – not being able to be with my kids, not having my old life … not being out there like one of you making money,” she said of the painting.

The bright handprint is a “statement of my life,” Partida says, with different aspects representing the positive and negative attitudes of those she dealt with while experiencing homelessness. The colors describe her most intense emotions.

“Anger … that’s where the black comes from. Red is the pain, the darkness of my life. Blue is the bruise, the scar that won’t go away but that I will have to live with,” she said.

Purple and yellow are the bright spots. “Purple is my favorite color and yellow represents a new start, like the sun starting to come out for me.”

Her experience brings both joy and concern to Volunteers of America’s (VOA) Shelter Services Director David Silveira. VOA manages center operations under contract with the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency.

“Creative expression, including not just art, but also writing and playing music, are powerful mediums for fostering healing and promoting mental health,” he said.

Silveira is worried about the center’s ability to develop the program further because of lack of funds.

“Unfortunately, our support staff too often has had to dig into their own pockets to provide supplies for our creative arts activities.” he said.

He is hoping Book of Dreams readers can help raise an estimated $3,000 to purchase more painting and drawing supplies, writers’ journals and pens, a karaoke machine and a few musical instruments.

VOA receives funding to provide for the basics of housing those experiencing homelessness, but it must rely on donors to provide quality of life activities.

Fellow shelter client Monique Moore, 39, also from Sacramento, says she can’t get enough of the art classes. Moore started her period of homelessness two years ago right across the street from where the center now stands.

“I made it back to exactly where I started being homeless. So I am right where I need to be,” she said.

She has been drawing since she was 9, and is grateful to have the supplies to do what she loves. When she was on the streets, she managed to draw at times, including once sitting in front of a Walmart painting an image of a dog over a stain on her sweatshirt.

At Meadowview, she has embellished masks with her art. She said she loves the feeling she gets when she sees people wearing them.

Her recent painting of the “The Simpsons” cartoon family depicts a heart with the words “Please Wear a Mask,” and came to her as a statement about COVID-19.

“I don’t want to get the virus. I don’t want nobody else to get it, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa or anybody else,” she said. “I feel everyone in the family has to take care of each other.”

Moore said she constantly worried about getting the virus while on the street, but is pleased now “to get a roof over my head and an outlet to occupy my mind.”

Art and other forms of creative expression do more than give homeless people something to do while they are waiting to get permanent housing and supportive services, said noted national art and healing expert, Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. Jeremy Nobel. Nobel is founder of the Foundation for Art & Healing in Boston.

“When these homeless women are making art, it puts them in touch with different thoughts and feelings and sorts them out,” he said.

“It gives them an artifact or a symbolic piece of art making that represents them but is not them. And when they share it with you, they view you seeing them in a more authentic way, not as a stereotyped homeless woman, and that is very healing. “

Creative arts tools are also cheaper than other more drastic forms of crisis intervention, he noted. “Eliminating a single emergency visit buys a lot of art supplies,” he said.

Silveira agrees. “Our homeless guests aren’t any different than the rest of us,” he said. “We all struggle to different degrees and we all benefit from art in our own particular way.”

He said he hopes with the Book of Dreams support, more healing instruments can be stocked and offered to clients as part of the suite of services that can help them heal.