To Write Love On Her Arms
posted in: Features
During the weekend of May 1st, I was fortunate enough to catch The Bamboozle festival in East Rutherford, NJ. Amid all the great headlining artists and line-up of up-and-coming acts, there were many vendors on hand with the purpose of either selling a product or sharing a message. I had the special opportunity to sit down and chat with Chris Youngblood of To Write Love On Her Arms about their non-profit organization and their mission. For those of you who don’t know, TWLOHA is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. They sparked this idea to help encourage and drive people in their treatment and recovery process.
IW: Can you introduce yourself and tell us what TWLOHA is all about?
CY: My name is Chris Youngblood. I’m the director of new media for To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA). TWLOHA is a non-profit organization addressing suicide, addiction, depression and self-injury, and we have been around for about 4 years” this is our 3rd year at Bamboozle. Basically, [we] started off as an original story about one single girl going through a sobriety recovery process. We printed some shirts with TWLOHA on them to help fund her treatment and recovery. Originally 200 shirts were printed and we were lucky enough to have Jon Foreman from Switchfoot be one of the first to wear it. He spread the word while playing a show one night and from there we got tons of positive feedback and messages reaching out from people over MySpace. Four years later, we became a 501c3 (non profit), responded to over 150,000 messages around the world and donated over $700,000 into treatment and recovery around the world.
IW: What are some stories that you’ve been personally touched by?
CY: One touching moment was in 2008 at Warped Tour. This girl was screaming in my ear because we could barely hear each other ” she had tears streaming down her face because her brother had committed suicide two months before this. To know that she had found some sort of hope in our message meant the absolute world to me ¦ those things stick with you and helps get you out of bed and motivated to keep pushing everyday.
IW: You have a very strong online presence. Where else have you been able to spread the word?
CY: Well, Hot Topic and Zumiez are our two national retailers ” Hot Topic has been incredible to us, on top of every shirt people buy they donate $1.50. On top of allowing our message and shirts to get into over 600 stores nationwide, they really stand behind us and it’s been incredible. Online is where we are strongest. We have a huge following and presence (Facebook page with over 500,000 people). Also, we are in the process of launching this campaign called “I AM ALIVE'” ” working with Christian Brooks Hope Center (the people at 1-800-SUICIDE network) who is working on the mainframe to get this online crisis center going ” they’re doing all the backend work of all the stuff that we could never understand [laughs] ” and QPR Institute are creating training materials for people who want to go through training to become a suicide hot line responder. It’s going to cost $2.5 million to launch. It’s a huge need and we obviously can’t put that out of our own pocket but we’re putting campaigns behind it to help raise money ” looking to launch this year if not summer 2011.
IW: What else can people expect of TWLOHA this year?
CY: Earlier this year, if you look online, you’ll see a huge surge of online campaigns ” we won 3rd place in the Chase Community Giving contest that gave grants to charities. We were able to get $100,000 to help kick off “I AM ALIVE.” We also just won a Twitter campaign through USA Today” don’t know when our AD is running but we got a full page AD marketed at $189,000 to create our message and put in front of 4 million people. It’s a huge, huge blessing. Every year in January we do an acoustic show called Heavy In Light in Orlando, FL. This year we had Aaron Gillespie of The Almost, Matt Kearny, Brice Avary from The Rocket Summer, Stephen Christian from Anberlin, Aaron Marsh from Copeland. It was at the HOB in Orlando. We are looking to take this on the road and share people’s stories of finding hope. Through this we want to raise money for local treatment and recovery centers in the different cities and regions. Mainly want to focus locally and touch upon communities but it’s about a global movement. There’s plenty of treatment and recovery centers but people don’t have the money to go in so we want to make it available to give scholarships to people to go to these places or money to these treatment centers where they can bring in people that could never afford it on their own. So that’s what we’re trying to do this year.
It was a great experience to speak with Chris of TWLOHA about everything that they’re doing for the local as well as global community. When you get a moment, visit their Web site to see how you can help get behind a movement that is slowly changing our world for the better.
Click here to read their vision and learn more about the non-profit organization.