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Act 2: Philadelphia City
Where Art Meets Hope: A curious adventure into the city-wide initiative that leads the way in utilising storytelling and public art as medicine.
Where Art Meets Hope
Philadelphia
Philadelphia is often called the "Birthplace of America," but beyond the Liberty Bell and old streets, the city's real spirit comes from its grit and a very real sense of brotherly love. It was the first city in the country to have a library, hospital, and zoo. Today, though, it’s best known as the Mural Capital of the World. With more than 4,000 murals, the city's walls share the stories of its people.
What sets Philly apart is how it uses art as a city-wide safety net. Programs like Porch Light have led the way in using public art to help prevent suicide and support people recovering from trauma. Painting is only the beginning. Workshops and community paint days let people add their own stories to the murals. The idea is that shame fades when shared in public, and creating something together helps people stay connected to each other and to life.
Journal Entry
On 22 April 2024, Victoria dropped me off at Manchester Airport. I flew to JFK and boarded a silver Amtrak train south the following morning — wide, comfortable seats, cinematic from the first mile, astonishingly cheap for the distance. America, I was learning, does some things on an epic scale.
I arrived at Philadelphia's grand, cathedral-like station at 11:30 p.m. and set off on foot through the warm, vibrant night to my home for the next month — the Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street.
I did not know it then, but I was staying in one of Philadelphia's most storied buildings. Built in 1894, the Divine Lorraine was the first racially integrated hotel in the United States. Under Father Divine — a civil rights activist who purchased it in 1948 — it offered 25-cent meals to anyone who walked through its doors. No one turned away. A radical act of welcome is built into the very walls. I also did not know, until I got home, that I had been living in a fairly rough neighbourhood. I never noticed. It wasn't as rough as Blackpool.
Tired, I quickly fell into a deep sleep, awoken rudely by my alarm for an early morning workshop in a city I had yet to know. Then, a few days exploring before meeting with Josh.
The city did not disappoint—street art everywhere — purposeful, powerful, alive. Philadelphia is the birthplace of Rocky Balboa, the legendary underdog whose story of dignity and determination through struggle has always felt, to me, like something far larger than boxing. Walking those streets at midnight, I understood why this city had produced both Rocky and Mural Arts. This is a place that has always known how to tell its stories of hope.
I did what any self-respecting pilgrim must do while in Philadelphia. I ran up the Rocky steps, admittedly slightly awkwardly British and the elegance of Mr Bean at the . I will neither confirm nor deny whether I raised my arms at the top with "eye of the tiger" looping inside my brain.
Josh Rivedal
Comedy, Tragedy and the Art of Creating Permission.
I spent a wonderful day with Josh Rivedal at Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market — wandering, eating, talking, laughing. He is that rare thing: a person who makes you feel immediately at ease and, at the same time, in awe of what they have done with their pain.
Josh is an actor, stand-up comedian, public speaker, author and founder of — a Philadelphia-based initiative that puts storytelling at the centre of mental health work, reaching colleges, universities and workplaces across the globe. His Changing Minds curriculum combines lectures, storytelling, group discussion, and improv theatre across five 60-minute modules — including one dedicated entirely to Storytelling and Support Systems. He has released multiple books, contributed to peer-reviewed research, and positively influenced hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
Creating Permission
His story begins in the darkest possible place. His father died by suicide. In the aftermath, Josh found himself standing at his own edge. He survived. And then he turned it into a show, not in a glib or exploitative way — in the most carefully crafted, psychologically intelligent way I have encountered. Josh walks into a room and begins with comedy. He tells the story of his father as if his father were still alive — funny, warm, full of specific human details. People laugh. They relax. They open up. And then the suicide comes. Because the audience is already invested, it lands differently. Then he brings them back — gently, with compassion and hope. And then people share their own stories. Voluntarily. Because Josh has created the conditions — the safety, the permission — that make that possible.
This is the Papageno Effect as live performance.
Journal Entry
With a few days spare before meeting with Gabe, it was time to explore this great city some more.
I visited the Liberty Bell. The security process is airport-level — belt off, bags through the scanner. My belt came off. My jeans did not stay up. The security lady laughed so hard she had to hold the desk. The Liberty Bell had witnessed many historic moments. This was not one of them.
I visited the Ben Franklin Bridge. I stood there for a long time. It is a space I have occupied before, in a different context — the stroke that brought me to the edge of my own story. I felt the weight of a thousand souls who must have stood there alone, feeling abandoned, unheard, unseen by the world. I stood there, and I did not look down. I looked out. And I thought about everything that had brought me here, to this city, to this bridge, on the other side.
I paid homage to Mural, an I Ching-inspired mural—one of Philadelphia's more extraordinary public art installations—and gave a reading. The message spoke of waiting for the right moment. Of not moving before the time is ready. Of patience, and what lies on the other side of it. I wrote it in my journal. I see the mural as symbolising hope when all else is lost, existential faith, if you will—never giving up.
Gabe Nathan
We met in a café — Café La Maude. I love meeting in cafés; it is where the best conversations happen, as well as in kitchens at parties, on long, unexpected shared journeys, and at bus stops.
Somehow, mid-conversation, my pocket caught fire. The waiter's best explanation was a hot plate squeezed past in the busy café. Philadelphia had always felt electric. Apparently, it was literal.
Gabe had worked inside the psychiatric system — had an epiphany: This is not the answer.
So he left. He got into a single car — a Herbie the Love Bug Volkswagen Beetle, emblazoned with the suicide and crisis lifeline number — and drove 1,100 miles. A documentary called A Beautiful Day Tomorrow followed. And wherever he stopped — at gas stations, at diners, at rest stops — people would walk over. And start talking. Strangers. Sharing their stories of loss and survival and recovery. Not because they had been referred. Because they saw a message on a window that said — this matters, and so do you — and something in them responded.
Gabriel Nathan — known to everyone as Gabe — is Editor-in-Chief of , an online publication dedicated to first-person essays and original documentary films about mental health, suicide and recovery. The name connects to a landmark Philadelphia documentary — OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger's Movie — described by the New York Times as moving and penetrating, and praised by NPR as a message of hope.
continues to collect and publish first-person stories of overcoming, of getting by, of finding the tools that helped. Gabe also serves on the Board of Directors of , working on statewide outreach and education.
Professor Singer
I met Professor Jonathan Singer, Past-President of the American Association of Suicidology, author of over 100 publications, and one of the world's leading experts on suicide prevention. Professor Jonathan B. Singer, PhD, D LCSW, is Professor at Loyola University Chicago's School of Social Work, Past-President of the American Association of Suicidology, co-author of the best-selling text Suicide in Schools, and a world-leading expert on suicide prevention (). He is a two-time winner of the National Association of Social Workers Media Award, an NASW Social Work Pioneer, and a Fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research.
He is the author of over 100 publications; his research has been featured on NPR, the BBC, the Guardian, and Time Magazine; and he serves on advisory boards for the JED Foundation, the Suicide Prevention Resource Centre, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. He is also the founder and host of the Social Work Podcast — the first podcast by and for social workers — with listeners in 208 countries.
When we met, he was generous, warm and refreshingly direct. He said something I have not stopped thinking about since. The research already knows where the answers lie — toward lived experience, toward peer connection, toward the authentic stories of people who have been to the edge and found their way back. What is missing, he said, is someone who knows how to go into communities and genuinely, respectfully draw those stories out — and give them back to the world in forms that reach the people who need them most.
Daralyse Lyons
I met Daralyse Lyons — author, actress, yogi, transformational coach and speaker, and self-described Transformational Storyteller — through the Porch Light storytelling committee (). She has made it her mission to stand for a more integrated world. A biracial journalist, actor and activist, she found her passion and purpose in empowering others to embrace all aspects of themselves — after writing an award-winning children's book about embracing her own multiethnic heritage ().
She invited me to join her at Temple University for the recording of On Being Biracial — a nationally recognised storytelling project co-hosted with journalist Malcolm Burnley, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Atlantic. The show explored mixed-race identity and the impact of not quite fitting in.
What Daralyse understands is that the stories we tell about who we are matter as much as the stories we tell about what happened to us. Identity is not fixed — it's a story we tell, and one that can be rewritten. This matters to mixed-race young people, transgender young people, stroke survivors, and men from Blackpool who don't fit the system's categories. The healing circle begins and ends with identity.
Her TEDx Talk — Black or White? Refusing to Choose and Embracing Biracial Identity — encourages individuals to embrace their own conceptions of themselves, to write their own identity rather than adhering to the mandates of society ().
Philadelphia Mural Arts
was founded in 1984 as the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network and has grown, under Jane Golden's visionary leadership, into the largest public art programme in the U.S — over 4,000 murals, 300 artists, and, for 40 years, a force for equity, opportunity, and better outcomes for their communities.
In 2011, Mural Arts formed a partnership with the City of Philadelphia's Department of Behavioural Health to launch the Porch Light Programme, which uses public art and community storytelling to address mental illness, substance use, and the tragedy of youth suicide ().
Today, the programme has completed over 100 projects, engages over 3,000 community members annually, and pays out $20,000 in wages monthly to economically insecure Philadelphians. Because art is not just therapy, it is employment, stability and dignity ().
"We don't create art about people or for people. — We create art with people. The process is as important as the product."
... Philadelphia Mural Arts
Porch Light Program
Long before I even boarded my flight to America, invited me to join the online committee for one of their Porch Light storytelling projects. A therapeutic team supported participants with lived experience of suicide to write and share their honest stories — not polished, not sanitised, but true.
The result was an evening of public storytelling that was hope-based but unflinchingly honest — the Papageno Effect not as media strategy but as live, communal healing (), including the remarkable Daralyse Lyons — actress, writer, activist and Transformational Storyteller.
Art as Medicine
In 2012, Philadelphia unveiled Finding the Light Within — a six-storey mural of a young man in a rowboat, struggling against rough water, while a figure on the shore throws him a buoy. Help is there if you can hold on. Over a thousand volunteers painted it, many of them families who had lost someone.
Yale University's four-year evaluation found that social trust increased and stigma decreased measurably — even among residents who had not directly participated (). They did not attend a workshop or a therapy session. They walked past a wall. And something shifted.
"When you create that space to make something, it opens up another world."
James Burns
The programme has also published a Replication Manual — a practical guide for other cities. They are not hoarding what they have learned. They are saying to the world — here is what worked. Take it. Build your own version. Save your own souls. ().
James Burns
The Weight We Carry
When I finally met James Burns — lead artist and collaborator at Mural Arts Philadelphia — it was over lunch in a back street of the city. Originally a teacher with the Archdiocese and the Philadelphia School District, James has spent over twenty years working in and with communities across Philadelphia, blending his practice as a working artist with his deep experience of listening to people and building things together ().
James has carried his own losses into this work. His grandfather. A childhood friend's brother. A college classmate. Suicide had touched his life long before he picked up a paintbrush for Finding the Light Within. As the community engagement work for the Embracing the Light mural was drawing to a close, a friend from his past lost a child to suicide. offering that child's name for the memorial. To make sure that the mother knew she was not alone.
"It is a club that no one wants to be a part of, but it is a convergence where I have witnessed the best examples of communal resilience and support."
James Burns
That is not a professional delivering a service at a safe distance. That is a human being carrying the same weight as the people he helps, still showing up, still painting. And of the community that gathers around this work — the survivors, the grievers, the families who lost someone and came to paint a wall in their memory: As for what he hopes people carry away when they encounter his murals:
Kindness, or light, when you need it most. That's the Papageno Effect painted six storeys high. I saw what becomes possible when storytelling is placed at the absolute heart of a community. Philadelphia did not solve its mental health crisis with murals. But it changed how a community sees itself, how it talks about suffering, how it responds to the person struggling in the rowboat on rough water.
It threw them a buoy.
Copyright © 2026 Kane Dodgson. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed in this report are those of the author and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners.
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