SpeakVolumes by bluePrint

Kicking off our second season, SpeakVolumes host Hanna G. brings the indomitable, powerful, and blisteringly chill Sabrina Labossiere and her story of growing up All New York. 

Jump on this episode and hear about the bricks that you lay in your life become the road you walk. Origin stories are the most foundational tales. Come hear Sabrina's story and what made her who she is.

In Part Two of our conversation with the founder of the SLAPcollective Sabrina Labossiere, host Hanna G. asks about bottom lines - fo her guest, for life, for the heart. 

Sabrina starts to see how the sweat she was pouring into the work she did before the SLAPcollective was just that: sweat. There was no joy, no euphoria. When it came time for Sabrina to leave her earlier work, there was no love lost between her and her old work.  The new work? All kinds of love.

Sabrina and host Hanna G. take apart the joys and pains that drive the creative process, and we find what pushed Sabrina to the writing, while the writing pulled Sabrina into the world of her nonprofit, her creativity, and her work. 

Part Three: Tears takes us through the mix of powerful influences that drive the journey to be of a community, a collective, a creative survival.

In the final installment  of Season 1 of SpeakVolumes, Hanna G hosts the incomparable and effervescent Soffiyah Elijah, the Founder and President of Alliance of Families for Justice.  We can think of no better guest to cap off our 2020 debut.  Born amid the original civil rights protests of MLK and Malcom X, Soffiyah shares how her personal experiences as a black woman in America helped her find her purpose as a teacher, a criminal justice attorney and an advocate for prisoner rights. As the BLM movement has taken on renewed urgency, never has her story been more timely.

In the second episode of the Soffiyah Elijah story, Hanna G guides the conversation with “the Queen” from the Ivied halls of Cornell University to the responsibilities of being a young revolutionary to the role of popular culture--music and entertainment in forming our identities. Along the way, Soffiyah reminds us that understanding history, finding our pride and our voices is key to finding our purpose.

In this last and final episode with Ms. Soffiyah Elijah, we focus on the American prison system and the unique approach to helping the incarcerated that the Alliance of Families for Justice is taking during these most bizarre times of COVID-19 and the BLM movement as the backdrop.  With every story, Soffiyah inspires with her infectious energy and her ferocious spirit, reminding us, that “we ain’t got no time to be tired!!!”

In this episode of SpeakVolumes, Hanna G reconnects with an old childhood friend, Dr and Pastor John Tyus. Through some shared memories, they talk about the sting of callous teacher’s quips and how alienation from our own identities leads to buried tears. A child of the Church and the ministry, Dr. John’s journey took many twists and turns, from an obsession with Michael Jackson impersonations to, trouble in suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, to the loss of his ultimate hero, before he discovered his purpose leading the ID Movement and providing support for fatherless young black boys.

Yeah, we all remember childhood and if we are lucky we have some happy memories.  But, when you think about it, growing up for most of us is a cruel, hard journey that requires at least some perseverance. For today’s guest, Dr. and Pastor John Tyus, resilience was borne of a search for his identity, a process that took this D-student  to seminary and to writing a PhD thesis. In this episode he poses the provocative question, what does it really mean to be a young black man? And what role does anger play in that identity?

In this final episode of SpeakVolumes with Dr. and Pastor John Tyus, we hear about addiction...yes, addiction to purpose…. and how that purpose has been tested beyond all belief in this unimaginable year of 2020.  How has the ID Movement changed in the age of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter? For Pastor Tyus, there is a change afoot that is delivering a new hopefulness.  Listen to this vision for hopefulness in the renewed energy to fight injustice that today’s challenges have unleashed!

In another addition of SpeakVolumes: Corona Chronicles, Hanna G sits down with Marty Medina the founder of Why Not Care, a service non-profit that looks to take care of the unmet needs of people in his childhood neighborhood of the Lower East Side in New York City. Marty knows poverty and reflects that he was an outsider, looking in at his life, where his art, not his words was his way to cope. In this animated convo, Marty gets right into it..talking about his multi-cultural heritage, and how the mix of gangs and politics, stints as a “brown boy”in Buffalo and Staten Island, life in the Smith House projects, traveling by skateboard, and exposure to multiple AIDS related tragedies inspired him to find his purpose.