Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:43
CREATIVE ACTS : The Lifeline for People who are or have been Incarcerated.
And I'm sure we'll invite her here in this conversation or start a new one, but I want to hear your story first, and then we can jump into the work you're doing. So can you give us an introduction to you and what you'd like us to know about your life and where you stand right now and what you're looking forward to from the place you're standing right now? And again, thank you for being here and I'm really looking forward to this conversation
Major Bunton
@Major_cause · 5:00
I'll say the age of 13 is when I began my destructive behavior, which led to true in a hall. It led to boys homes, it led to the county jail and eventually a life sentence in prison at the age of 21. I started life sentenced in prison in 1991. I was 22 years of age today. I realized I was terrified. I was afraid. I was just so numb that I was no longer ever going to see the streets again or even my family at that
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 0:49
Because that's what I want to focus on, is this alumni group and how we can get to know them here and how we could swap stories and dig in and help everybody understand what the work you're doing is and the importance of it. So start with your story with Creative Acts and then let's go from there. I really appreciate it
Major Bunton
@Major_cause · 3:18
How it all started. I would say 2016. During my change, a program by the name of the Actors Gang, which is a theater program in Culver City, decided to come into the prisons and use theater as a way to help people transform their thought process, their emotions, and just their way of life. In that process, there was a teaching artist named Sabra Williams, who is the founder of Creative Acts. We went through a seven day intensive program
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:46
To have people come here and start their own Swell casts and their own personal podcast and tell their stories, I know that's important because the more people understand the stories, the more we can see some. We need some reform. That's an understatement. Hearing sober talk the other day, I was just thinking, people don't know how much these kinds of programs are transformative and how much we need to support them, because these are our brothers and sisters in jail. I don't care
Major Bunton
@Major_cause · 3:01
So the alumni lab is 15 formally incarcerated men and women who meet once a month to talk about curriculum content. How we can create games that speak of trauma, games that open up people in certain spaces, like like prison, juvenile hall. We tried to figure out different ways that we experience that aligns with the work that we're teaching, that helps us identify something internally
