Founder’s Legacy
The RTA community is indebted to the extraordinary legacy of its Founder Katherine Vockins for her leadership and vision in changing lives behind prison walls—and beyond—for over twenty-five years.
“I spent half my professional life in the business world as an international market expert with my husband Hans Hallundbaek. When Hans had a ‘mid-life correction,’ I continued to run the business while he looked for more meaning in life, attended New York Theological Seminary and became an interfaith minister. In 1996, curious about his volunteer work teaching a college-degree program to incarcerated men, I followed him behind the walls of New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility – an experience that blew away the myths and stereotypes so many of us believe about the incarcerated.
Later at Sing Sing, a small group of men who dreamed about writing a play turned to me to help make it happen… and so Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) was born. I am forever grateful to the founding members at Sing Sing who helped launch the program and set it on the right road, including Dewey Bozella, David Wayne Britton, Sean Dino Johnson, Derek Rogers, Robert Sanchez, Mark Wallace, John “Divine G” Whitfield and Vince Warren.
Early in RTA’s story, the members realized what we were doing was not about making theater or a pathway to Broadway, but about self-development and change, what we now call ‘the process.’ Throughout the years, I witnessed how finishing a drawing, learning a dance, or performing a role in a play gave incarcerated men and women a new sense of what is possible. For so many RTA participants, having experienced genuine achievement, they began looking to see what else can be accomplished – through academics, job training, or greater self-awareness. RTA alumnus Kenyatta Hughes said it best, ‘The arts make you think differently, so you can act differently, so you get different results…isn’t that the definition of rehabilitation?’
There have been so many high points in my 27-year RTA journey, from being awarded game-changing grants from the Art for Justice Fund and the Mellon Foundation, the personal milestone of receiving an Honorary Doctorate from the State University of NY/Purchase College, to leading passionate staff and teaching artists. Most fulfilling, though, has been the privilege of personally knowing hundreds of RTA participants and alumni, all of whom learned to ‘trust the process’ and use the arts as a tool to transform and succeed.”
– Katherine Vockins, Founder of RTA
