LOTUS Legal Clinic is a nonprofit that offers services to survivors of sexual violence and human trafficking. They do this mainly through legal support. But they also do it through art.
LOTUS’ annual Rise & Thrive Artist in Residency pairs up a group of survivors with a local artist to help share their experiences in the aftermath of sexual trauma.
This year, singer songwriter Chris Porterfield and his band Field Report took the poems from five survivors and created an EP, titled Trust in Movements Made. It’ll debut at a benefit concert Thursday, Sept. 12 at the Cooperage in Milwaukee.
"You really want to honor the spirit of the initial work," Porterfield explains. "And so there are things that I never would have come up with if I was just, you know, creating from myself in the universe. But being able to respond and mold some of these things, a lot of the lines are just theirs, you know, and I was just organizing them and presenting them in more of a song format."
Erika Petty, executive director of LOTUS, says the clinic is first and foremost a nonprofit and they've seen a reduction in funding from the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA).
"All of the organizations that were funded by VOCA knew that there was going to be a reduction. Our understanding was that was going to be around 15% to 20%. It ended up being actually like 41%. And so that really hit all of us in Wisconsin pretty hard," Petty says.
Petty says they'll need to cut back on the work they do including therapeutic arts programming. But she praises the Rise & Thrive program and Porterfield's work.
"It's just so hopeful. The process just brings me a lot of hope and I think in many times in our days, that's what we need is like we need that hope. We need that shared humanity that I think this brings to light ," Petty says.
