The Art of Healing: Expanding Reach and Impact with GMU's Veterans and the Arts Initiative

What happens when a community conversation sparks an initiative that reshapes the local performing arts landscape for veterans? Dr.  Niyati Dhokai, the Program Director of the Veterans and the Arts Initiative at George Mason University's Hylton Performing Arts Center, joins us to recount this transformative journey. From humble beginnings, this initiative has grown into a vibrant hub offering music, visual art, writing, theater, and dance workshops and hosting special events like Veterans Day celebrations and concerts throughout the year.

When the pandemic hit, the Veterans and the Arts Initiative had to think on their feet. We discuss how they adapted swiftly, implementing innovative practices that ensured safe instrument access and allowed the initiative to go virtual. This shift kept the local community engaged and widened the initiative's reach, reconnecting with members who had moved away. Dr. Dhokai shares how they stayed in touch with their community members, ensuring their continued involvement. She also unveils plans for an upcoming virtual writing workshop series targeting women veterans, an exciting new chapter for the initiative.

We wrap up our conversation by highlighting George Mason University's Military Veterans and Families Initiative.  As we look ahead to the 2024 schedule, Dr. Dhokai paints a picture of George Mason University's extensive support to the military and veteran student population and military families in the community. Join us for this compelling discussion illustrating art's vital role in the veteran community.

Transcript

Larry Zilliox: 0:15

Good morning. I'm Larry Zilliox, your host Director of Culinary Services here at the Warrior Retreat, and today we're going to be talking about the Veterans and the Arts Initiative at the Hylton Center over in Manassas nearby, and that is a George Mason University project and I have the director here, so I'm gonna let her introduce herself and all her titles and Then we'll get into the program and you know what's it all about.

Niyati Dhokai: 0:49

Hi, and thank you so much for the opportunity to be here and have this conversation with you. My name is Dr Niyati Dhokai I am a research associate professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason University, and it is also my honor to serve as a program director for our Veterans and the Arts Initiative, which is based at our Hilton Performing Arts Center at our SciTech campus in Manassas, Virginia.

Larry Zilliox: 1:14

Wow, okay, I'm glad you Did that, because I would never have gotten any any of that, really. So the program is how old?

Niyati Dhokai: 1:24

so that's a great question, and you know what I'm so proud to say that we're coming close to 10 years now. Yeah, so the program was conceptualized as an idea that should happen in 2014, and the way that we really started is just. It's a beautiful story of this community that we're in, and, you know, one of the one things that I love about our program and your program is is that, you know, serve our willing warriors and the Hylton Performing Arts Center. They're quite adjacent to each other geographically, especially in the region that we're in, and so you know, we've both emerged around the same time, and for us it was community conversations. You know, we we live in an area where we have an amazing military connected population. They're very service oriented, they're very involved with their communities and, as we noticed them coming to the Hilton Performing Arts Center, they wanted to know ways that they could be more involved and they wanted to know ways that they could get their friends and neighbors more interested in the offerings of the Performing Arts Center as well, and they asked us if we had considered any kind of dedicated veterans programming, and so, in 2014, we had a panel on music in the military, prior to a concert by a military band and the panel was so well attended, which doesn't always happen for academic style panels at a university. And so this is where we knew we had some, some good interest and some potential between these conversations and what, what resulted from this panel and these, these magical synergies, that kind of start to come together.

Niyati Dhokai: 2:57

So I circled back to George Mason University around the same time.

Niyati Dhokai: 3:01

George Mason University is my alma mater and at the time I had been working with veterans and service members who are in post-acute neuro rehabilitation, supporting their community integration through music, and I was asked if I had an interest in supporting the design and facilitation of a program such as what would become the Veterans in the Arts Initiative at a larger scale.

Niyati Dhokai: 3:26

And I mean, this was the dream of a lifetime to be able to serve at this level. So I had so many conversations with the Hilton Center staff who had already put in such good work. I had conversations with our Veteran community. We talked on an individual basis, we talked in groups and we discussed what the arts mean to us. We discussed what our arts practices looked like at the present, but also what they could look like if we had further fostering of those opportunities, and from there we had our first big Veterans Day celebration, which I believe that you were part of in 2015, where we literally just turned the entire Hilton Center into a celebration of veterans in the arts and hence became the Veterans in the Arts Initiative.

Larry Zilliox: 4:12

Yeah, wow, I do remember that we had an info table set up. There was a large number of veteran service organizations that were there and it was a great event and it was a good way to kick off the initiative and the program. Tell our listeners what the program is. It's, it's music, it's just all sorts of arts. So when they hear that, what are we really talking about?

Niyati Dhokai: 4:42

That's a great question, and we get that question all the time from people kind of wondering like what is? What is a program like this look like, and what could it look like for me if I decided to be a part of it? And so the way that this program works is we have lots of different workshops in the arts, specifically in music, in visual art as well as in writing. In the past We've also had workshops in theater and dance as well. We also have a lot of special events, such as our veterans stay, celebrations and other opportunities to Enjoy concerts throughout the year, and so people have opportunities to engage with the arts in the way that's most comfortable for them, whether it's an active participation whereby they're creating something on their own or alongside a friend or a family member, or coming on their own and then meeting new people within our community, or if they decide that the best way for them to participate in the arts is to attend a concert and to really take in what's happening on stage and to engage in kind of more of a meta kind of way. And so you know there's opportunities to engage in every single way, and how it is that we decide our programming is kind of again goes back to those organic conversations.

Niyati Dhokai: 5:54

So those first Veterans Day celebrations taught us that one of the things that people most often look forward to was an opportunity to learn guitar. There was always a story about a guitar taken on a deployment. You know people playing guitar at the end of the day, everyone gathering around that guitar or guitars from memories at other points in life at church, played around a campfire, at different types of celebrations or just casually. And you know folks always wanted to know like, if could I try the guitar, could I improve my guitar skills, would there be an opportunity to do that? And so with that, we created our first workshop series outside of these Veterans Day celebrations, and that was our guitar workshops. Then, from that, we began to notice that a lot of our participants were actually military kids who were coming alongside their parents, and this was a significant population for us, up to 25% at times. And so for them we began to create a songwriting series for military kids which will now be presented in the sixth year in the spring of 2024.

Niyati Dhokai: 7:02

And during our first songwriting series for military kids, which we actually produced alongside musicians from Camo, the Center for American Military Music, opportunities and Fort Belvoir were such good friends of all of ours. We noticed that these military kids were so engaged, so dynamic, but they all had one thing in common at the time, which is that they all brought with them these ukuleles that were so personalized. They were different colors, they had stickers on them, they were so unique and really told the story of each military kid. And so with that we created a ukulele workshop series, and so not only was that popular with the military kids and teenagers, but we found that ukulele was actually a gateway to playing music again for older adults, for whom finger dexterity and muscles had kind of changed a bit, so that guitar wasn't as comfortable of an option anymore. But ukulele, which was a bit smaller and with only four strings, was a bit easier to engage with and to handle.

Larry Zilliox: 8:03

And that's an important part of the program is that it's not just veterans, it's military active duty and also families. It's just everybody come participate, which I think is huge. Started in 2015, so it takes off and then boom 2020, covid hits. What happened then?

Niyati Dhokai: 8:28

So COVID hit and I will never forget the day as well many of us, and it really felt like that. Friday, march 13, 2020, was the day that everything kind of shut down. I remember so many of us who had been working in in-person settings which was pretty much all of us at the time were told to go home and we were told that we would be at home working for an indefinite period of time, and at the time, veterans in the Arts Initiative had been engaged with a project called Creative Forces. What Creative Forces is is the National Endowment for the Arts Military Healing Arts Network. So the specific project of Creative Forces that we were actually engaged with was their Community Connections Project, and this was being administrated through our state arts agency, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and through them, we had a contract to offer our ukulele workshop series a second time. So our first Community Connections Project had been to offer the ukulele workshop series in August of 2019. And it had been wildly popular. We were filling rooms to capacity with ukulele every time we offered it. Approximately 40 people in the room every single time, and that was about the capacity of the room that we had scheduled this activity for.

Niyati Dhokai: 9:46

So the second time that we had planned to offer. It was in that time period that was, march 2020, not knowing what would happen, but we had made a commitment to Creative Forces, to the National Endowment for the Arts and to our military community. So we did everything that we could to change our implementation strategy. At the time, the word was pivot. We pivoted as hard as we could in five days not even five business days, but in five days to bring the series into implementation on that following Wednesday, so that our military connected community could participate in it and so that we could offer it a second time. We had a research protocol that was attached to the ukulele workshop series a second time around. That our community members knew about. They knew that, due to the success of the first offering, that we were offering it the second time as a research project. They knew that, as they were signing up, what this means was that their identities would remain completely anonymous, but we were looking to understand what kind of sense of community was being developed by playing ukulele together in a room as military connected people, and was there any kind of social support that was being gained as well?

Niyati Dhokai: 11:02

We made it happen and we were actually able to implement our surveys as well. It was to the point that, if you know, accidentally someone was left off of an email or a Reminder to fill out a survey. They were coming to us because they were like this is really important work. This is work that needs to be done and we want to make sure that we are a part of it. And so, after we did that first change over into virtual programming, we just continued down that route.

Niyati Dhokai: 11:29

We made our guitar series virtual as well and then, because it was the height of the pandemic, we were going to stop programming at that point after both of those series were finished. But we actually brought upon a third series, which was Bring your ukulele, bring your guitar, bring whatever instrument you have at home. If you don't have an instrument, just come for the camaraderie, but just join us. And we found that we had over 85 people joining us Every week from around the country and around the world to engage with music and just to have the support of each other. And those chats were so engaged.

Niyati Dhokai: 12:06

We were supporting each other, checking in on each other. We even had a song that we all wrote together. It was called the toilet paper blues. It was about the fact that we didn't have so much toilet paper at the time, all the time at that period in the pandemic, and so our community was so full of resilience and humor that they actually made up a song called the toilet paper blues, and it became a bit of a theme song for us during that time period, and every time we'd feel sad we just start singing and playing the toilet paper blues.

Larry Zilliox: 12:37

Wow. And so that community just grew organically absolutely around this need to connect during an almost impossible time, because Not only were you guys pivoting, but everybody else was sort of what's this zoom thing all about? And, and I'm sure for a lot of Veterans it wasn't easy. It took me a while to figure this out out, but the payoff is just enormous. Were you able to get instruments out to people, or how did that work if somebody was coming into it new but didn't have a ukulele?

Niyati Dhokai: 13:19

So that's an interesting question. During that springtime, we were not able to get instruments out to people, and that's one of the reasons why we made the instrumentation so flexible Is because we didn't know a safe way to do it yet, and it was that that time, when people are still understanding how the coronavirus Operated I mean, I did they be just an understand details about how it could be transmitted from person to person, how to keep ourselves safe, and so we were still waiting for information about that, and so we weren't able to do that at the time, and so we just decided to make our Implementation as flexible as possible. What was good, though, is that, by the time the fall semester came around, this was the time where we had all moved along to curbside pickups and trunk deliveries and that sort of thing, and so, by then, we had worked with the risk management department at George Mason University to devise a protocol that felt safe, and so what we did was we devised a protocol whereby People would fill out a form to borrow an instrument ahead of time. They would drive up to the Hilton Center, have an instrument delivered to them, which we would then tell them not to open for several days, and then, once that time period that had been pre-established was finished, they could then open their instrument and engage with it. And so we were so glad to then start being able to offer that and to make sure that we were removing those barriers to access for those who wouldn't be able to participate because they didn't have an instrument, and so we were able to do this for our local community, for our community that was joining us from around the country.

Niyati Dhokai: 14:56

Now, that is a story unto itself, and so up until that point, the Hilton Center community that participated in the Veterans in the Arts Initiative was very local, very regional. The farthest we had anyone participate from was maybe about 50 miles away from the Hilton Performing Arts Center. We had people coming from as far as Montgomery County, maryland, to participate in our programming. Suddenly, when we became virtual, we found that people were finding us again. So one of the things we have always done with the Veterans in the Arts Initiative is we've created a mailing list that we have kept. And so, even though our military-connected community members tend to move a lot, you know, when they have new duty locations or as they retire the first time or the second time or, you know, have different types of life patterns that take them to different places to be closer to family or friends that they need to be closer to at different points in their lives. We never take them off our mailing list. If they choose to come off the mailing list, that's their choice, but we always keep them on.

Niyati Dhokai: 15:56

And so what was great was as soon as everybody found out that we had gone online. We realized that all the people we had been emailing over the years had been reading those emails. And so suddenly, people who we hadn't seen in two, three, five years from the earliest days of the program were so excited to get on the Zoom and wave hi to us and, you know, show us how they were doing where they were, to show us what their arts practice space looked like in their new home and how they had kept up with some of the skills that they had begun practicing with the Veterans in the Arts Initiative, to introduce us to new members of their family who they had moved to different parts of the country to be closer to, to introduce us to new pets. And so it was such a special time whereby we all got to reconnect in this really unique and meaningful way and learn that that sense of community that we had developed at the Hilton Center had really stayed and continued on and was able to continue on now virtually.

Larry Zilliox: 16:59

And in addition to the music, you mentioned writings, specifically songwriting, or is there journaling or blogging, storytelling? What does that look like?

Niyati Dhokai: 17:11

So writing for us.

Niyati Dhokai: 17:14

We do songwriting for military kids, but one of the offerings that we're gonna be having this January that I'm very excited about is we're gonna be having a writing workshop series that is going to be virtual for our women veterans.

Niyati Dhokai: 17:27

So one of the things that Veterans in the Arts Initiative has been recognized for is our service to the women veteran community. We have a large number of women veterans just participating in our workshops. For many of our workshops, we have up to 30 to 40% of our participation numbers being women veterans, which is quite high because currently about 16% of our military is women identifying people and that's the largest percentage that we've ever had in our history, and so we're really proud of the fact that women veterans tend to find a home in the Veterans in the Arts Initiative, and so we will be having this virtual writing workshop series. It's very thematically and topically based on new beginnings, but people can write in the style that works best for them, whether it be journaling, writing, prose, writing, poetry. We'll be having an award-winning writer who has actually worked with the Walter Reed community, with the healthcare providers and with our military community at Walter Reed facilitate these workshops, and we're really looking forward to it.

Larry Zilliox: 18:34

Wow, and what about other types of art like painting or I don't know, ceramics or clay, all the different kinds that are out there?

Niyati Dhokai: 18:45

So we've tried a little bit of everything over the years. One of the things we've found that has been most popular has been photography, and again it was our women veterans who were the trailblazers there we had. Our first photography series was actually our iPhone photography series for women veterans. That was in 2018. It was a unique series because it included women who had served from the Vietnam era through women who had deployed during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. So they all came together and they took pictures that reflected their self and their social identities, which is really interesting to us because women veterans they identify as service members, obviously, when they're serving in uniform, but a lot of times we've found that once they leave military service, if they're the one to leave first in their partnership and if their partner is still serving, they'll often identify as a military spouse, they'll identify as a parent, they'll identify as a community member, they'll identify by their civilian job, but one of the things that they don't always tell us is that they're a veteran, and so it was interesting to see how all of those different parts of self and social identity did and did not come together for our women veterans, and especially initially, but then to see how, over the course of the series, they were able to share their experiences with each other and note that there were so many similarities that they did have between their different eras of service, between the different types of jobs that they did, between the ways that they identified with the community now and then, of course, through their artwork.

Niyati Dhokai: 20:25

It was so meaningful that we actually asked each of the women who participated if we could have three photographs that they had taken as part of the series and put them together in an exhibition, and this exhibition was shared at the Hilton Performing Arts Center in our Buchanan Partners Art Gallery.

Niyati Dhokai: 20:46

It was also shared at the Virginia Women Veterans Summit that was hosted by the Virginia Department of Veteran Services in Hampton Roads, and so we traveled with this one, and this one was also one that, during the pandemic, provided people with a lot of support, because we actually digitized it, added some music under it and then added on some captions so that people could see the titles that the women veterans had given to their photography, who had taken the photos and which branch they had served for. And we found that a lot of folks were telling us that by seeing such beautiful photos, they themselves realized that, you know, at a time where there wasn't much that we could do, especially in the earlier days of the pandemic, we could take out our phones and create beautiful art, just by looking at the world a little differently, because we all had time to do that At least many of us did, and so it just provided a different insight, a different focus.

Larry Zilliox: 21:43

So talk about what it's like to partner with the Hilton Center. It is, I think, an amazing facility and we've seen a number of things there. It's just a great organization in the end. I know you've had a long-standing partnership with them, but tell people a little bit about the Hilton Center and how it helps your organization.

Niyati Dhokai: 22:10

So the Veterans in the Arts Initiative is actually part of the Hilton Performing Arts Center, and so the Hilton Performing Arts Center is one of two performing arts centers that is based at George Mason University. So we have two performing arts centers One is the Hilton Performing Arts Center in Manassas, virginia, and then we also have our Center for the Arts in Farapax, virginia. What makes the Hilton Performing Arts Center so special and such an ideal location for a program such as the Veterans in the Arts Initiative is the Hilton Performing Arts Center was truly created and envisioned as a community based performing arts center. It was created under a tripartite agreement between the city of Manassas, prince William County and the state as George Mason University, and so, as such, unlike typical performing arts centers that you'll see at a university, the Hilton Performing Arts Center actually has a majority of their programming that is community-based.

Niyati Dhokai: 23:13

We have very strong arts partners, arts affiliates and community-based programming that comes to the Hilton Performing Arts Center, we also have an education initiative that is parallel to our Veterans in the Arts Initiative and that makes sure that local skilled children have at least one opportunity to visit the Hilton Performing Arts Center and to experience a performance on our beautiful merchant hall stage during their educational careers, and so it's a really special place where we make sure the community knows that this is their space, and so, as such, it's an ideal space for something like the Veterans in the Arts Initiative, which is a hub for the arts and the community to come together.

Niyati Dhokai: 23:57

For our military-connected community members, and whether they might be service members who are at Fort Belvoir or Marine Corps Base Quantico or in the DC area installations or bases, whether they be veterans who have recently left military service and who are examining what their civilian lives might look like in different ways, through family transitions, pre-post injury transitions, work transitions, just everything. The Hilton Center is a wonderful place to begin that journey and to consider how the arts might be a meaningful part of one's life.

Larry Zilliox: 24:38

Yeah, part of the healing process.

Niyati Dhokai: 24:40

Absolutely.

Larry Zilliox: 24:40

For sure, I also want to talk about George Mason.

Niyati Dhokai: 24:43

University.

Larry Zilliox: 24:44

It has made such a commitment to veterans and to the US military. There's a large student veteran population. They support your program, they support our program. We reached a point where we knew that when guests came stay with us, the difference that we saw when they checked in and when they checked out was just amazing. And we needed a way to quantify that, because when we sought grants and things, you can tell people that, but we needed quantitative data and it was George Mason that stepped up and their psychology department. They put a team of PhD students on it and created an entire survey program for us on when the warriors checked in, when they checked out, and six months later and we now are able to develop the right kind of information to help us support our grants. And their support has just been amazing for us.

Larry Zilliox: 25:55

And I really do wanna put a plug in for George Mason University, because I'm not aware of another university that supports military and veterans like George Mason does. We just so appreciate them here and everything that you do. What's the upcoming 2024 schedule look like?

Niyati Dhokai: 26:18

Sure thing. And first of all, back to your comment there. I do remember that moment where we had that conversation about all of those beautiful testimonials that you were receiving from the veterans, service members and their families as they left the retreat, and you had all of this wonderful anecdotal data, but you didn't have the quantitative or the qualitative data that you needed. And I remember I was able to connect you to Dr Keith Renshaw, who was the chair of our psychology department at the time, and one of the things that he did, and that I have been very proud to be on the leadership team of, is George Mason University's Military Veterans and Families Initiative, and so what that does is it brings together, exactly to your point, all of the different components of George Mason University that are dedicated to supporting and serving our military and veteran students in different ways, as well as our students who are parts of military families.

Niyati Dhokai: 27:21

And this just doesn't end with our student population.

Niyati Dhokai: 27:24

That extends out into the community as well, because all of us are doing different types of work and all of us are seeing different types of work in action, and so the wonderful thing about having a George Mason wide initiative is that if veterans in the arts initiative is better in contact with, for example, to serve our willing warriors, just first of all because the fact that now our relationship does go back 10 years due to our geographic proximity and also because of the fact that we share such a supportive, community-based mission.

Niyati Dhokai: 27:58

When we talk about what it is that we're seeing with our respective programs and we see ways that we could collaborate, the way we can support, I can ping that information back to my friends and colleagues who are fellow faculty members at the university and say, hey, I see an organization here that is in need of some further support, and this is a wonderful opportunity for our students to learn, and this is how we make these connections happen and we force, multiply to better serve our military connected community. And this is exactly what we should be doing. This is what a public university does, is we serve the communities around us. So it's a privilege to be able to support you all in this way and we hope that we will continue doing so in this way, and so thank you for highlighting that.

Larry Zilliox: 28:43

Well, listen, it's comforting to us to know that if we need something that you all are able to provide, you're more than happy and willing to do that for us, and of course it trickles down to the families and everything. So we're just so grateful for our partnership with you and GMU and the Hilton Center. How can people get in touch with you?

Niyati Dhokai: 29:12

So they can get in touch with us by visiting our website, which is wwwhiltoncenterorg, and that's Hilton spelled with a Y, so wwwhylton c-e-n-t-e-ro-r-g. And on it, on the homepage, you'll actually see a link directly to the Veterans in the Arts Initiative.

Larry Zilliox: 29:38

Nope.

Niyati Dhokai: 29:39

And that is where you'll see upcoming community events. You'll see our upcoming workshops, upcoming concerts, and you can read the descriptions for what the activity will be. If it looks interesting to you, Register and give it a try. A lot of folks are trying these activities for the first time. We usually find that with each workshop that we host, about one third of the people that we meet are repeats from a previous workshop, which is wonderful. It means that they've enjoyed a previous one and they're ready to try something else. But we find that a solid two-thirds of our participants are actually new. We attribute this to the fact that we live in an area where so many people are always moving in and out of the area.

Niyati Dhokai: 30:24

We also attribute this to the fact that so many people try an activity or two for a while with us, but then they go on to pursue these activities on their own.

Niyati Dhokai: 30:34

We've had women veterans who were in that initial photography workshop series enter their own photography competitions and win prizes, and then they'll come back to tell us about it. We have people who've participated in our guitar workshops for several years take a break, but when they come back to tune up their skills they tell us that they took that beginner-level information that they learned and they've actually been teaching older veterans on their own how to develop guitar skills. There's some wonderful stories about artistic practices being cultivated, artistic support being paid forward, and so this is what our community does. When they develop a passion, they get so interested in what it is that they're doing. They look for a way to support others with it, and a lot of times people bring a buddy or a friend to the workshop. So it's a very wonderful, open community of people who are always participating. So come on over to the Hilton Center and give a workshop a try.

Larry Zilliox: 31:37

Yeah for sure. Visit the webpage and check out everything that they have to offer. Sign up for something. You're not going to be disappointed, I guarantee you. And there's a variety of things. There's something for everybody, and don't forget the rest of the family. It's family-oriented and everybody's going to benefit. Before you know it, you're going to be playing that guitar around a campfire and everybody's going to be singing. You're going to have a great time, and that's all because of the Veterans in the Arts Initiative. Doc, I appreciate you coming out today and sitting down and telling us all about the program, because it is a very special program Really. Thank you for coming out.

Niyati Dhokai: 32:22

Well, thank you so much for being such a dear friend, colleague and neighbor. Well, it's been an honor.

Larry Zilliox: 32:27

I want to tell our listeners that we will have another episode next Monday morning at 5 am is when they drop. If you have any questions or suggestions, you can reach us at podcast at willingwarriorsorg. Until then, thanks for listening.