Youth Stories: Claribelle Pagan
Members of The Possibility Project make art, but The Possibility Project isn’t about art. Or, better said, it’s not about art as a finished product; rather it’s about the process of making art, and what the art as an act can do. What can we say through art that we can’t say through any other medium?
“I could talk at The Possibility Project,” Claribelle Pagan says. She is one of the stars and writers of Know How, The Possibility Project’s 2015 film about survival in the foster care system. She won Best Actress for her performance at the Madrid International Film Festival, an experience that inspired her to be a flight attendant.
Her voice doesn’t shake as she talks, but it does drop an octave, like she’s trying to make hard words softer. “I don’t think I recovered much from [my abuse] until I got into The Possibility Project … here, I could actually talk about it. It was very emotional at first, because you think you’ll get over things. But there I was at fifteen, crying over something that happened three years ago. I still had to talk to [my abuser], and see him, and pretty much act like nothing was wrong, and it was…”
Stressful. The word she chooses is “stressful,” though surely there are others that would be just as fitting: traumatic, painful, impossible, unfair.
Claribelle knows exactly how unfair life can be. She was separated from her brother while in the foster system, often unable to attend school, and unceremoniously abandoned when she turned twenty-one despite having no resources to get a foothold anywhere.
“They didn’t help a lot. I had to find myself a job and when I did, they didn’t help me find an apartment or anything—in New York City it’s mostly about networking and who you know and I didn’t know anybody, I was fresh out of foster care. My agency took me to a homeless women’s shelter. I was the youngest person there. I didn’t know what to do.”
Her voice takes on a tone of incredulity as she recalls the weeks following her aging out: “My social worker called me to see how I was doing, and I was like, ‘How do you think I’m doing? Try getting dumped at a shelter with no support and no money and not even able to go to school—which is the reason I got placed into foster care to begin with! Educational neglect!’”
Know How is built on a foundation of unfairness—foster kids versus New York, constantly pushing the boundaries of what they are willing to do to make it a little farther, last a little longer. Right before the opening musical number, a voiceover ruminates about all the ways that falling through the cracks of the system is easier than staying on your feet: “If I wanted to be a drug dealer tomorrow, I could. But I can’t be a doctor tomorrow. I can run the streets way quicker than I can graduate. When you’re down, it’s hard to look up.”
That’s where The Possibility Project comes in.
For Claribelle, who was living in a diagnostic residential center when Paul Griffin, the organization’s founder, invited her to join the program, The Possibility Project offered her the opportunity to lift her eyes from the ground.
“I was like, ‘sign me up. I don’t care what it is; I don’t care if I’m scrubbing floors. I want out.’ … That’s how I got started. And I stayed with it.”
When Claribelle gushes, “I made so many friends,” she sounds giddy, her voice rising up again, almost on the verge of laughter. “I could hit them up at any moment—at four in the morning, I could say, ‘Yo, I need to talk,’ and they’d say, ‘All right, cool. Let me take a break from my shift.’ Or whatever it is that they’re doing … it’s the only stable place I have ever known.”
Boiled down to its curriculum, The Possibility Project is a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding, youth leadership, skill development, and arts education. The program brings together diverse youth once a week for a year; the organization facilitates discussions about issues both personal and social, and gives those discussions verve with added training in diversity, conflict resolution, and community activism. The program then harnesses those discussions and skills to create art: an original musical, written, produced, and performed by the cohort. These productions are as much about exploring the past as they are an attempt to shape the future. Know How lays bare the struggles of kids in the system, but it also tries to answer the question of how to affect change.
“It’s building a team,” Claribelle explains. “Weaving a safety net.”
The cohort begins by doing team building and trust exercises, and then every member is given the chance to open up about their experiences, talking about “whatever they think is important.” From these stories, the skeleton of the musical is written.
Over the course of the following months, that skeleton is fleshed out into scenes and characters and music and, eventually, a finished show.
“After four or five performances, the cast gets together and plans a community action project. They take what’s important to them, like suicide prevention, and they take it to the streets.”
Claribelle’s cohort turned Know How into a movie. They’ve been doing community screenings and using the film as a platform to raise awareness and take action to improve the foster system in New York and beyond.
Beyond, by the way, is where Claribelle wants to go. She flew to Madrid for the film festival, where she won Best Actress, and on the flight over, something clicked.
She laughs as she recalls the eight-hour flight: “I was like, I have to do this for a living. I love traveling. I told Paul, I’m going to live in an airplane. I want to see the world.”
Far from the girl who was once nicknamed “The Dark Cloud,” Claribelle’s airborne dreams suddenly seem distinctly, well, possible. The award-winning actress, writer, and producer is finishing her GED this year, and applying for flight attendant school.
The Possibility Project is an arts education organization, but more than that it’s about giving teenagers a voice. It’s about bringing together youth who have their eyes firmly affixed on the cement and giving them a reason to look up.
Claribelle Pagan looked up so far, she took flight.