Who We Are
Crossing Point Arts offers our services to any anti-trafficking agencies that are committed to helping survivors overcome their trauma. Since 2013, when we launched our workshops at Polaris Project in Newark, NJ, our work has been embraced by these agencies and noted for the creative and therapeutic approach we take, which has proven to be an integral aspect of survivors healing processes.
In our workshops we have both domestic and international participants. Africa, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Europe, the Caribbean, South & Central America, Mexico and the Middle East were once called home to the thousands of survivors we have encountered. Survivors who are from the US are sometimes trafficked right in the neighborhood in which they grew up, and very often domestic survivors were trafficked as children, when they were between 12-14 years old. Wherever they come from, the experience of creativity not only helps to restore sanity and a sense well-being, but also helps to build community.The expressive arts are recognized as an effective therapeutic tool in the integration of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations as a way of dealing with traumatic experiences. Crossing Point Arts strives to provide support and professionally guided rehabilitation to participants in their journey of personal and collective restoration. Workshops led by paid Teaching Artists - all active artists in their respective areas of music, dance, theater, visual arts and writing - provide survivors with therapeutic tools in a safe environment of self-expression, enrichment, empowerment and community building.
Each week we show up to teach workshops to survivors a variety of workshop in the Bronx, Queens, Lower Manhattan, Central Harlem and East Harlem. We conduct ongoing workshops at GEMS (Girls Education and Mentoring Service), WomanKind EMPOWERGyn, Lifeway Network, Sanar Institute, anti-trafficking agencies in the NYC area which bring comprehensive aid to help rebuild the lives of survivors with housing, therapy, medical and child care, education, legal support and job training.
Impact
Those who experience our workshops are gaining greater access to their own creativity, which becomes part of a holistic healing process designed to independently and collectively develop health, strength, and emotional resilience, community building, coping strategies, empowerment and post-traumatic growth.
About Our Logo
Crossing Point Arts was named in honor of the inconceivably difficult journeys people must take — and have taken throughout history — to reach freedom from enslavement and exploitation. Our organization name also speaks to the profoundly healing qualities of creative work, which we invite survivors of trafficking to engage in toward inner liberation. The point that is crossed internally for our workshop participants through creativity and self-expression is a point of departure from trauma toward wholeness, expansion, integration and the intrinsic freedom that is their birthright.
Our bird, designed as a graphic without an outline, holds together by moving forward, flying in self-determined freedom. The bird's eye is open, fixed on the future. Greens and blues connote freedom, heart, expression, and healing.