6 minute read

THE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS AWARD

from CHILD USA GALA 2023

from CHILD USA GALA 2023, page 8

THE THOMAS P. DOYLE WHISTLEBLO...

The Honorable Tara T. Shephard

know whether my dad would be coming home. But he is my example of fighting for the rights of others by any means necessary. My strength and toughness — resiliency I got from my dad.” As an adult, she laughs, this translates into her “severely unhealthy work habits,” because she doesn’t stop until she gets results.

After earning her B.A. and M.A. degrees in criminal justice, Shephard took a position as program director of the Arkansas Juvenile Assessment and Treatment Center (AJAT). “I was just drawn to the idea of working with justice-involved individuals, she says, “and believed I had the fortitude to make a difference in their lives.” Her journey into advocacy for vulnerable girls began in 2001 when she became clinical coordinator for City Girls in Chicago. As supervisor of this residential substance abuse treatment program for teen girls ages 13-18, she received an invitation in 2002 to speak on substance abuse at a conference called Just Us Girls. She was both overwhelmed and inspired by what she experienced there. Upon arrival “all I saw was rows and rows of buses,” she says, “and when I went in, I saw a sea of girls, 3,000 or more. I thought ‘this is the most fabulous thing I have ever seen in my life! If I ever get the opportunity, I will most definitely do something like this.’”

Resiliency and hard work are the hallmarks of Representative Tara Shephard’s life, and they are the values she has worked hard to instill in the many girls and young women she has inspired to aspire over decades of advocacy and serving others.

Now in her first term in the Arkansas State House of Representatives, she is using her position to continue the service that has its roots in community involvement and volunteerism. She has helped to get the statute of limitations laws expanded for reporting abuse, and gained national attention for her bill to put opioid overdose kits in Arkansas schools.

Shephard’s father is her role model. “I tell people all the time that one of the proudest moments of my life was to see my dad, a big strong man, putting on that uniform and going off to war,” she says, adding that her father served three tours of duty in Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan. “These were also some of the saddest moments of my life, because I didn’t

Fast forwarding a few years, she returned to Arkansas and AJAT. In 2010 she was invited by then- Senator Tracy Steele to participate in a leadership class hosted by the Stand Foundation. At the end of the course, attendees were required to complete a community service project and Shephard’s thoughts went immediately to the Just Us Girls conference. “I started running around, talking to everyone about this extraordinary experience in Chicago, telling them I wanted to bring it to Arkansas, and asking if they would help me. And pretty much, everyone said ‘No,’” she laughs. She essentially was told she had to have a business in order to establish credibility.

“That’s when resiliency kicked in, and I began to work on establishing the non-profit. Then I found out I needed money to start the business,” she adds. “My dad helped me with the funds to start the non-profit, Delta Community Based Services.” With this base, Shephard partnered with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and in 2011 began hosting the annual At-Promise Girls Empowerment Conference there, which continued until 2018. Its purpose, Shephard says, was to talk about things that are most impactful to girls, and to be gender-responsive. Girls traveled from all over the state to attend the open-registration event, and the 12–18-year-olds were primarily black. Over 400 girls attended the 2018 event, a 120% increase over the inaugural conference.

Anyone could volunteer at the conferences, she says, but only women who had some sort of license or certification could actually be in front of the girls as speakers or facilitators. In the end, there were over 70 volunteers. In addition to the facilitators’ first requirement for credentialling, all volunteers had another requirement – to be able to be a teen girl for a day. What did that mean? “If you couldn’t show up in a wig and a tutu, then you couldn’t volunteer,” Shephard laughs. “I had judges, I had lawyers – everyone was coming in a wig and a tutu!” Of course, there was a purpose.

“We know that relationships are of first importance to women and girls” she continues. “I didn’t want them coming to an event where everybody was stiff and the girls wouldn’t feel they could open up to the volunteers. Instead, they saw us as friendly, inviting, welcoming and non-threatening. We were there to have fun, but we were also there to educate those girls.” Attendees had sessions with either a medical doctor or a nurse practitioner; they had sessions with a licensed alcohol and drug abuse counselor, and they also had a mental health session with a psychiatrist and/or a licensed mental health professional. “Each of those professionals was there in their wig, tutu and their At-Promise tee shirt!”

Post-conference surveys were administered to help direct preparation for the next one. After the 2018 event, there were questions about ACEs, adversities the girls face in their lives, along with the standard final question asking if there was something the conference organizers missed or didn’t cover.

“One of the girls responded ‘You didn’t talk about me being raped,’” she says, “and although the responses were anonymous, we did capture the ages of the respondents. She was 12 years old. I just sat there and bawled, just cried about the 12-year-old girl that we missed. “After years of thinking I had covered all my bases, I wasn’t prepared for this.”

In 2018, Shephard was invited to a luncheon of Black Women in Public Health, a group of women advocating public health policy, and expressed her frustration that she had this report from an individual she could not find and did not know how to help. They encouraged her to “get her voice out there –not only hers, but other girls’ voices, too.”

Again, that resiliency kicked in and Shephard began contacting individuals for help putting the information from over 300 surveys into a report showing what was happening to girls in

Arkansas. Eventually, she found funding and partnered with the Arkansas Minority Health Commission and the UALR Race and Ethnicity Institute to produce In Their Voices – Adverse Childhood Experiences for Black Girls in 2019. This report was released at a summit held at UALR for funders, stakeholders, community members, etc. in place of the conference, which was discontinued due to COVID-19 restrictions. Since then, she has been on a mission to raise awareness for the adversity that many children face.

The report is not the only publication birthed by Shephard’s efforts. A wonderful tool, produced with girls at the largest lock-up of juvenile girls in Arkansas. “Eighty percent of the girls who enter the justice system have experienced some physical or sexual trauma. We lock girls away, telling them they need help,” she says. “But we lock them away with strangers. I noticed them doodling, and I simply became tired of watching girls journal in empty pages, trying to understand themselves through journaling. They needed guidance. I asked them for 30 feeling or emotion words that would be the foundation for a book. We had 1,000 words, but could only use 30,” she said. “They all insisted that one word that must be included was shame, because each and every girl there was experiencing it.”

With those 30 words and assistance from social workers, psychologists, English professors and graphic designers, Shephard produced a remarkable journal, Who Am I? A Girl’s Guide to Thinking It Through. It is designed to help any girl, anywhere in the nation develop self-awareness, learn from mistakes and be happier. Over 5,000 of these journals, full of reflective questions and illustrations of faceless “every girls” have been distributed nationwide.

Now that she is a legislator, Shephard is not sure if she’ll be able to bring the conferences back, although she still receives many inquiries about it today. “Unfortunately, I have not been able to find anyone with the same passion for the girls that I had to take it over. It is absolutely a loss.” However, it is her mission to continue “hustling for others. I want my life to show that I made an impact.” n