Now she looks fondly across the room at Bird, who is wearing her pearls, with a teary smile.
"I had thought that what I had to say wasn't important no one had listened for 37 years," Mitchell said.
But Bird listened and shared her own hardships with Mitchell. Together, Bird and Mitchell found ways to express their struggles through theater.
The unlikely pair met through "Telling My Story," a program developed by women and gender studies professor Pati Hernandez to help people find their voices through theater to incite social change. The program focuses on prisons and on opening communication between people on both sides of prison walls.
"It was a shocking sense of social abandonment," Hernandez said of her first experiences working with inmates.
Hernandez chose to focus on inmates and wanted to create something positive and constructive from the destructive experience of prison and the life that leads someone behind bars.
Hernandez developed the program in New York City before moving to Vermont in 1998, where she soon recruited Dartmouth students as volunteers. In 2007, Hernandez teamed up with English and women and gender studies professor Ivy Schweitzer to incorporate "Telling My Story" into a women and gender studies course, Telling Stories for Social Change. If anyone can attest to the class' success, it is Rachel Sarnoff '12 she liked the class so much, she took it twice.
Students in the class visit a prison twice a week to talk with inmates and work on short skits culminating in a final performance at the end of the term.
Last week, a panel of women came together in Brace Commons to share their experiences with Telling My Story, including former inmates Mitchell, Kim MacDonald and Charlotte Rankin, as well as Sullivan County Prison program director Jane Copeland, Schweitzer and students Allie Bradford '12 and Christina Stoltz '06 GR'07. The panel attracted nearly 100 students.
Copeland described an initial Telling My Story meeting as being similar to an eighth grade dance inmates on one side, Dartmouth students on the other. But eventually the two groups began to connect, learning that they shared some of the same challenges and fears.
"I had no voice, I was terrified of my own shadow," Rankin said of herself before participating in the program.
Rankin sat timidly in front of the audience last week, the butterfly tattoos on her crossed forearms matching the delicate pink butterflies dangling from her ears. By the end of the program, Rankin felt as if she had "found some confidence," she said.
Nell Pierce '13 organized the event, just one of the ways in which she has immersed herself in the program since taking Telling Stories for Social Change in the summer of 2010. Before coming to Dartmouth, Pierce spent time in Guatemala City where she ran an art program in a community center.
"That really kind of lit a fire in me as far as the power of the arts," Pierce said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "What [participants] express is accessible to so many people because art is something people can relate to."
In Telling My Story, Pierce has found a supportive outlet for continuing that work at Dartmouth. Last summer she returned to Guatemala and instituted another program informed by her experience with Telling My Story. In the program, Pierce worked with children to explore what it means to be a youth in Guatemala through poetry, theater, visual art and other art forms.
Pierce said she likes that the program helps people develop communication skills and learn about themselves, as well as offering a space for openness and vulnerability.
"Telling My Story targets populations of people who have really never been listened to in society and gives them the tools to express those things in an accessible way," Pierce said.
Pierce said she hopes students who attended the panel will be inspired to get involved in their community, whether through participating in Telling My Story or by different means. She also hopes that students took away with them a willingness to be more honest with one another.
"We have a responsibility as students to be open with each other and provide that opportunity," Pierce said.
The former inmates are also looking to extend the opportunity they were given by helping others in similar situations.
"It's much easier to get out of jail and never look back," Copeland said. "They're not doing that. They're paying it forward."
With Christmas approaching, Mitchell, is working with a community corrections center to collect Christmas presents for inmates and their children. She also wants to provide donated clothing to inmates leaving prison with nothing appropriate to wear to interviews as they look for jobs.
MacDonald will soon earn a bachelor's degree in behavioral science with the goal of becoming a drug and alcohol counselor. In the meantime, she has started her own cleaning business.
"[Telling My Story] made me see who I was," MacDonald said.
MacDonald hopes to help others in similar situations, especially those who normally could not afford to see a counselor, she said.
