Survivors with Finding Our Voices have broken the silence of domestic abuse for three years, all across the state, in community centers, museums, libraries, hospitals, the Holocaust and Human Rights Center, and universities.
No entity has been more welcoming to us, and more committed to serving their community, than the Scarborough Public Library.
Lucy Jackson Norvell, the library’s coordinator of programming and communications, asked for the full set of our 43 posters.
Each 11” x 17” poster features the photo portrait of a different named, Maine survivor with a quote referencing some of what we transcended, letting those in it know they are not alone, and all others know it can happen to anyone, it’s complicated, and it has got to stop.
In October, Domestic Abuse Awareness month, we also scheduled in a panel discussion with local survivors on how domestic abuse impacts the children.
Then I sat back in Camden, in awe, as Lucy, the Children’s Librarian Deanna McNamara, Director Nancy Crowell and Assistant Director Catherine Morrison, kept upping the game.
Deanna invited the library’s Teen Advisory Group of middle and high school students to hang the posters, alongside Governor Janet T. Mills who is one of the survivors on our posters and stopped by to join in.
A humungous (2’ x 4’), vintage Finding Our Voices poster of 82-year-old Mary Lou Smith, retired first-grade teacher, proclaiming “It’s never too late to leave” went up in the entry way.
With pretty much every public wall surface of the library now covered with survivor faces and voices, Lucy asked for a slew of additional, smaller, Finding Our Voices posters for each of the the library bathrooms.
The library invited the student president and vice-president Clare Shaw and Sruti Tadikonda of the local high school’s Reducing Sexism and Violence Program to speak at our panel discussion, as well as the police chief and representatives of Through These Doors.
The library’s enthusiastic and creative promotion of our events brought in 75 people to the Oct. 20 panel discussion, from far away as Lewiston.
Mary Lou spoke of the terrorizing that she and her four children were subjected to by her USM-professor ex-husband in their beautiful Scarborough house. Riley Kennedy, 17-year-old Miss Cumberland County, spoke of her boyfriend giving her a black eye when she was 15 and because of what she saw at home from her father while she was growing up, thinking this was normal. Rebekah Lowell, Jennifer Greensmith, Janet Desmarais and Tiffany Pacin also gave eloquent, honest, and heartbreaking testimony.
inding Our Voices plans to take this concept — poster exhibit and Survivor-Speaks panel discussion — on the road in 2023, to other communities across the state.
I want to thank Lucy, Deanna, Nancy, and Catherine, and their small library with a huge heart, for the hard act to follow of an establishment stereotypically known for shushing people gathering, educating, and serving, their community with a whole lot of beautiful noise.
For more information on Finding Our Voices, go to https://findingourvoices.net
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