Dissonance Collaborates with "Passenger Recovery" in Detroit

The two nonprofits look to help build a national network of artist-support organizations

One of our dreams at Dissonance is to establish a national network of like-minded organizations committed to helping artists maintain wellness, share their experiences with mental health and addiction recovery, and advocate for others. 

We are doing that work in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and, to some degree, in greater Minnesota. Now, we are looking to collaborate with other individuals and organizations pursuing similar missions.

One such organization is Passenger Recovery, a nonprofit founded by Christopher Tait, keyboardist for indie rock vets Electric Six. We met with Chris when his band's tour brought him to St. Paul for a recent show (opened by our friend Mark Mallman) at the venerable Turf Club. 

Sober Green Room Now Available in Twin Cities, Detroit

We whisked Chris away from the venue for a sober green room experience at the home of Jordan Hansen, a Dissonance supporter and blogger. We were actually testing out Chris's own idea. Passenger Recovery has a dedicated green-room space in downtown Detroit, available to any sober touring artist. After talking to Chris, we have decided to begin offering the same to artists traveling through Minneapolis-St. Paul, using a variety of spaces available through our local network. Chris had been on the road for a couple of weeks when we met, and he noted -- as others have to him -- how wonderful it was to get away from the van and the venue for a refreshing wellness break. 

New Tool to Find Support Meetings on the Road

For us, the time with Chris also provided an opportunity to discuss Passenger Recovery's new support-meeting finder called Compass. It's an innovative, GPS-enabled tool to help traveling artists locate Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, National Alliance on Mental Illness, and Refuge Recovery (Buddhist-inspired) support meetings. The Compass database includes thousands of individual meetings, is growing every day, and likely will be expanded to include other types of mutual aid meetings as well. We’re grateful that Chris and his partner -- Electric Six bassist Matthew Tompkins -- did us the favor of making Minneapolis-St. Paul the second metro area to get populated, after Detroit. Check out the beta version of the tool and find a meeting near you, wherever you are.

On our Resources-Tools web page, we now have a link to Compass. The page also includes links for artists to request sober green rooms through us for Minneapolis-St. Paul and through Passenger Recovery for Detroit.

As we think about our dream of establishing a national network of organizations like ours, the immediate aim is to work with Passenger Recovery to create a northern corridor of artist support from Detroit to Minneapolis. We are now seeking like-minded organizations in Milwaukee and Chicago to fill in the major gaps. 

We are also beginning to establish relationships with other more far-flung organizations like the SIMS Foundation in Austin, Texas, and the BTD Foundation in New Orleans. If you are involved in such an organization, or know others who are, please contact us.  Let's build this national network/collective/community together.

Chris Tait, Jordan Hansen

The Sober Green Room at Jordan Hansen's place in St. Paul

Chris Tait, Jordan Hansen

Jeremiah Gardner, Matthew Tompkins, Chris Tait

Chris Tait, Jordan Hansen

Chris Tait, Jordan Hansen

Jeremiah Gardner, Chris Tait

Help the Helpers

By Carl Atiya Swanson

“Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need.” That line from Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain” rolls around in my head a lot, as a reminder sometimes the best way to help yourself is to help someone else. There have been innumerable studies showing the positive effects of helping others, and if you’re a 12-stepper or have been in a recovery program, you know that service to others plays a key role in the journey into wellness.

That was why, three years after getting sober, I decided to go through the Crisis Connection volunteer training. Crisis Connection is the 24-hour phone line & text service responding to people in crisis. It handles all the Minnesota calls for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. It’s a place for people who feel they have nowhere to turn to find someone willing to sit with them in their pain, listen, and help them plan to stay safe, stay alive. It is a quiet, irreplaceable service that catches us when we fall. And it almost just went away. 

The volunteer training at Crisis Connection was incredibly in-depth. Over 2 months, I learned about grief, loss, addiction, mandated reporting, and more. The nurses and clinicians who led the trainings were invariably kind, dedicated and funny people, because you have to have a sense of humor to stick it out in this kind of work. I learned listening skills, how to talk to people to find out if they were safe, how to make plans to keep people safe - skills that I use to this day.

I only made it through a few shifts. I was still pretty new in recovery, and the intensity of the calls shocked me. Biking home at 2 in the morning after a particularly long call, I threw in the towel. I still had work to do on myself; you can only forget about that for a while, like Dylan says. But it’s one of the first resources I offer to people, because I know how powerful it can be.

Crisis Connection almost shut down last month because of a budget shortfall at Canvas Health, which operates the service. We can’t let a resource like this lapse for lack of a relatively little amount of funding. The Minnesota Department of Health stepped in with funding to keep Crisis Connection in operation until late September, but we know that the need for connection and safety nets carries on, especially into the winter months. So we need Crisis Connection to stay, and stay strong.

If you have stories about Crisis Connection, or if you wish you had known about Crisis Connection when it mattered to you or your loved ones, make that known. Share comments below, or send us a note at dissonancemn@gmail.com that we can share with Canvas Health. Tell the Minnesota Department of Health that this is an effort worth funding. Tell Governor Dayton, tell your elected officials, share your story with the folks running for governor in 2018, and ask them to make mental health services a priority in our state.

We also hope to see you at the Stomp Out Suicide 5k on August 19. Funds raised will support Canvas Health's mental health, substance use, and crisis services. 

And, if you are in crisis, call (612) 379-6363, or text “Life” to 61222 to reach Crisis Connection. Talk to them, and stick around. We need you here.