Some Highlights from the EXPO Gala, Held October 5
Some Highlights from the EXPO Gala, Held October 5
By Sherry Reames
I bought tickets for this year’s EXPO (EX-incarcerated People Organizing) celebration and fundraiser primarily because I wanted to hear the guest speaker, Susan Burton. Ms. Burton’s organization, A New Way of Life, is providing a transformative model of housing for formerly incarcerated women, as many of us learned from Delilah McKinney when she spoke at the MOSES Lunch and Learn in May.
Each Gala attendee received a copy of the book Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women. But Ms. Burton was too modest to give a very long speech. She shared a little of her own life story: falling into despair and addiction after the death of her 5-year-old son, and being sent back to prison six times because she relapsed whenever she returned to her troubled old neighborhood in South Los Angeles. What finally saved her was being welcomed into a safe and quiet home in Santa Monica, where she could genuinely start to heal from all the traumas.
As a result of that experience, she decided to buy a little house and turn it into a sanctuary for a few recently released women. Today her organization has a dozen such houses in South Los Angeles, each of them providing its residents with other needed services, including assistance in reuniting with their children, and there are dozens more in other parts of the country.
Ms. Burton’s program started taking root in Wisconsin, she said, when EXPO and FREE members Marianne Oleson, Tamra Oman, and Delilah McKinney came to one of her training sessions. They established the first house here in Madison with her advice and assistance, and she continues to work with them on both planning and fundraising. As she explained, “We do the work behind the hope – and hope is not free.” If the rest of us want to help provide safer, healthier housing for vulnerable women, an ideal way is to make a recurring financial donation.
Besides its headline speaker, the EXPO Gala featured selected artworks and a catalog from “Art Against the Odds,” a major exhibition of works by incarcerated artists that has been shown in Milwaukee and elsewhere in Wisconsin, but unfortunately not yet in Madison because of last-minute snags at our Museum of Contemporary Art. This wonderful collection is reportedly still in need of a permanent home.
The program at the Gala also included awards and brief speeches by some heroic members of the community who are doing vital work on behalf of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. This year’s honorees: (1) Cheri Branham, a social worker and prison doula who gave birth to her own child while in prison 10 years ago; (2) David Murrell, a former juvenile lifer who now works with incarcerated people in his position with WISDOM; (3) Peter Moreno, director of Odyssey Behind Bars, which is now partnering with the UW-Green Bay to offer Wisconsin’s first associate degree programs in the prisons; (4) Erica Nelson, director of Lift Wisconsin, which helps returnees get their drivers’ licenses back; and (5) Ruben Gaona, director of “My Way Out,” which tries to provide returnees with whatever they need, from bicycles to moral and psychological support.
Another highlight of this sold-out event was the company! People were connecting and reconnecting throughout the enormous Monona Terrace dining room. I happened to be seated next to Jeffrey Stovall, the principal of Wright Middle School, and enjoyed hearing news about that school (where I used to volunteer as a tutor) and the work of Jeffrey’s wife, who owns a home in Milwaukee for women re-entering the community after incarceration. Pam Gates reported that she had the honor of sitting next to Eugene Nelson, who has worked with Project Return in Milwaukee for six years, helping people get back on their feet after incarceration. After his own 21-year incarceration for a crime he didn’t commit, Eugene is very proud of his work, his clients, and most of all of his tiny daughter, who had just celebrated her first birthday!