To be a good teacher, you must first be a good listener. Contemplative listening is at the heart of our work with homeless children.

One hundred thousand children wake up homeless in America every day. They have lost almost everything — including their childhood. Through art, these children can express the unspeakable. They can give a voice to their fear, rage, fear, isolation, and longings.

At an organization that grew out of my own volunteer work — Drawbridge: Arts for Homeless Children, over 1600 children find a safe environment where they can express themselves. For some of them, this is the only stable, predictable time in their week. We hold 27 weekly arts groups in family shelters and low-income housing facilities in six California counties. We make the children's art into beautiful holiday cards, the sale of which helps to support our work. We've also had a number of exhibits of their art work, including one at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

A number of our volunteers are formerly homeless teens who came to Drawbridge as young children.

In response to requests from communities around the nation, we have put together a week-long training on everything from fund raising and expressive arts techniques to the effects of trauma on children. It's extremely gratifying — centers based on our model have been created in Tuscon, Houston, and San Diego. There is international interest, too, and this year we are working with a young man from Ghana who will go back and work with street children there.

My studies in psychology, expressive arts, and spirituality at CIIS gave me a solid background that has been invaluable in my work. In fact, one of the most practical tools we use at Drawbridge is what Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn calls contemplative listening, a form of deep listening. At its core, our work is to show up, to bring our full presence to being with the children. It's all about just being with them, listening to them, finding out who they really are and what they really need, rather than what we think they need. We bring our best selves to them, and this brings out the best in them.