CHORDS THAT BIND
Chords That Bind utilizes the power of music to foster family unity and maintain parent-child bonds during a parent’s incarceration. The program’s aligned post-incarceration Sewing Workshops use craft to build professional skills and provide an opportunity for additional income for people returning from prison.
Chords That Bind connects storytellers from programs like The Moth’s Justice Project and graduates from in-prison music programs like Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections, to incarcerated parents with a young child at home. Working by video phone, the Storyteller and Musician Instructors use a specialized curriculum to help parents create a unique and personalized song for their child. Parents record their song on a voice recorder, which is sewn into a stuffed animal and delivered to their child. Whenever the child squeezes the stuffed toy, they hear their absent parent singing to them their song.
In the Sewing Workshops, formerly incarcerated people are trained to design and make Chords That Bind stuffed animals and other consumer products from remnant fabrics and other donated materials, which they sell through special sales venues. Workshop participants learn craft, entrepreneurship, and other marketable skills, and receive a training stipend and sales commissions. Graduates can keep their sewing machines and tools to continue developing their craft, start a small home business, and supplement their income.
Chords That Bind is a collaborative program, teaming with a variety of agencies & organizations to launch its pilot in New York State, including:
• The NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS)
• The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office
• The Moth’s Community Justice Program
• PEN America’s Prison & Justice Writing Program
• Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections
• Music On The Inside
• Materials For The Arts
• Cisco Home
• Interfaith Prison Partnership
• Freer Records
Once the pilot has demonstrated the program’s efficacy, Chords That Bind will expand into other correctional facilities in NY and other states, and look to develop its Sewing Workshops in prisons, with direct pipelines to employment or small business development when workshop participants are released.
Prism Reform also will work with Freer Records and other organizations to recruit well-known musicians to record original Chords That Bind songs and donate the licenses to Chords That Bind. These songs will help raise awareness of how our justice system promotes family disintegration in low-status, disadvantaged communities. A percentage of proceeds, together with a percentage of sales of products created in workshops, will help fund program expansion.
For more information
or to support or sponsor Chords That Bind
contact Tommy Safian at info@prismreform.org
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