I arrive at the Ford-Warren Branch of the Denver Public Library at 4:00 pm on a Monday in early February. I’m there to observe a Frames Comic Program class—an initiative of Brink Literacy Project. They don’t usually meet on Mondays, and technically the class has ended. This is an optional meeting to work on their pitches, which will be due on Valentine’s Day.

Valerie San Filippo, this group’s facilitator and the Education Program Manager at Brink, is the one who sent the invitation to her students. She thinks there may be only a few coming, she tells me apologetically.

But soon, eight students have trickled in. Dressed casually—a few in black hoodies, one in an oversized Steelers windbreaker, another with Beats headphones slung over an ear—all are in their late teens or early twenties. They don’t make their way to the small semicircle of chairs set up on one side of the room just yet; instead they bounce around the large, mostly-empty space, teasing each other and beelining for the snacks Val has set out unceremoniously on a side table.

Eventually, they find their way to the circle. Valerie asks them, “How is your weather?” and they easily fall into the language of metaphor. Then she tells them the possible outcomes if they pitch their comics—they could be published in Brink’s print literary magazine, in a student anthology, or online.

There are some of the routines of a classroom, but in most ways it’s unstructured. She tells them to fold their paper “hot dog” then “hamburger” style. Some are typing their stories; others are hand-writing or drawing. One student calls Valerie over for input: “What’s another word that means….”

Valerie lets almost everything go—she doesn’t run a traditional classroom with all its behavioral restrictions. Students get up and leave the room and return as they please; their banter is lively and full of colorful language; no one pesters them to stay on task.

Part of me can’t believe that these students—some out of high school and fast-approaching their 21st birthdays—have voluntarily come to a library on a Monday afternoon to work on this project, submitting to reminders that their story should include a hook, exposition, a turning point, and resolution.

But these aren’t just any stories—they’re their stories.

There is a clear link between lack of literacy and incarceration. A widely cited statistic states that two thirds of children who cannot read proficiently by the end of fourth grade will end up incarcerated or on government assistance.

This is the problem that Brink Literacy Project—soon to shorten its moniker to Brink to better reflect the breadth of their work—exists to combat. The name itself reflects who they serve, I learn from Helen Maimaris, Brink’s Chief of Staff. They engage with communities who are often underrepresented or overlooked—on the brink of society—and also on the brink of change, where possibility flourishes.

I meet Dani Hedlund, Brink’s Founder and CEO, at a coffee shop. She’s there before we arrive and she stays for hours afterward, working at a laptop in the corner. You get the sense that she’s always working.

Tall and lithe with striking blue eyes and blonde ringlets, at first glance she gives strong Cinderella vibes, but speaking to her for a few minutes dispels any notion of demure timidity. She is warm, passionate, and assertive—her speech articulate but peppered with profanity. And you have to think it’s intentional. One of her former students, now an employee, Jaron “Jay” Cook, tells us her coarseness once put him at ease. To Jay, it signalled authenticity and made him feel like an unsanitized version of his own story would be welcomed.

To understand Brink’s origin story is to understand the origin story of Dani herself. She grew up in rural Colorado, a “low-opportunity, low-income, high-drug sort of environment,” she tells us. “And the opinions about me, because I had undiagnosed dyslexia and I was raised by the town alcoholic, were that I would never amount to anything, that I was never going to be smart. I was never going to get out of that town and I would end up an addict just like my father.”

What came next wasn’t itself unusual. “It’s very stereotypical,” Dani explains. A couple of high school teachers saw something in her and offered her books, which helped her envision a future for herself outside of her limiting environment.

By eighteen she had left and earned a scholarship. “I realized how close I came to never having that opportunity and also how little it took to completely change the trajectory of my life,” she says.

Inspired by the simplicity of the solution to her own challenges and armed with the optimism of youth, Dani started Brink when she was still a teenager.

The model functioned on two core beliefs. The first was that the stories we tell ourselves matter, and they often become self-fulfilling prophecies. The second was the importance of education, giving people the tools they need to succeed.

Brink partners directly with the Department of Corrections and reentry programs to target four demographics: youth who are justice-impacted or at risk, adults and youth in facilities, those in reentry, and youth in underserved areas in an effort to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. “If society is a ladder and we’re supposed to be caught on every other rung of it,” Dani explains, “maybe it’s our parents, our families, our teachers, our community, our social worker—if you fall through all of those, you tend to be justice-impacted. It’s also the point where you feel most alienated from society.”

So, she started developing a curriculum in 2015, and by 2017 was teaching it in the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. Essentially a graphic memoir course, the curriculum uses comics to engage participants in reading and writing in an accessible way and to help them reimagine their own stories. Students focus on turning points in their lives, when a different decision could have led to a radically different outcome, to help them see their own agency in spite of difficult circumstances.

What Dani didn’t anticipate was the social-emotional impact of examining these stories and the impossibility of separating that from the literacy objectives. She recalls asking students for feedback after the first class she taught in Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, expecting input on content.

Instead, they spoke of learning to talk to a daughter again, of dealing with past traumas and not having nightmares anymore. “Oh man,” Dani recalls thinking. “We are running therapy, and I did not realize it.”

Now, what they describe as “sneaky therapy” is a core part of how Brink frames their work for students and educators alike. “Education skills are great. Career pathways are wonderful. We do workforce development like badasses,” Dani says. But where the traditional model of education and funding cares primarily about test scores, “For us, it’s really the big gooey, wonderful, holistic, personal stuff” that leads to self-transformation.

They don’t take that responsibility lightly, bringing on clinicians and mindfulness experts to review curriculum, experts their students might not otherwise see. Jay talks about his own experience as a student, of sharing stories he and his peers never would have talked about under other circumstances. “In my community, it’s not normalized to go out and pour all your business out,” he says.

It’s the most common phrase we hear in our classes, Dani says: “I’ve never told this to anyone before.”

And while they knew the comic program was working, it eventually became apparent that something was missing from their two-part model. Dani had always known that storytelling has incredible power to change the person telling the story. But, she realized, "The other great thing about storytelling is it deeply impacts the people that engage with those stories. And we were like, all right, maybe it’s a three-part model. It’s giving people the tools they need to thrive, making sure they believe in themselves enough to use those tools, but also elevating those stories into the national zeitgeist so we can have the societal change that’s needed to actually pay it forward.”

The first thing you should know about the third part of Brink’s model, a literary journal called F(r)iction, is that it’s weird.

Understanding the importance of students to see themselves in a text, Dani and her team had been seeking stories from marginalized voices to use in the classroom. Discouraged by the barriers inherent in traditional publishing, they decided to start their own publication. At first it was a very traditional literary journal. “It was a terrible knockoff of the Paris Review,” Dani admits. But they quickly realized that wasn’t helping anyone.

So they decided to take big chances and publish stories they thought would actually change lives. Dani wanted to spark critical thinking and challenge readers to see the world differently. “And so that means there has to be intellectual friction. You have to read stuff that kind of pisses you off, from values that are different than yours,” she says.

They intentionally include stories around each of F(r)iction’s themes from a variety of perspectives. “And that allows you to say, ‘Okay, wow, I haven’t really thought about my body in the same way that a trans kid in Tennessee has. I haven’t really thought about the issue of identity as much as someone who’s actually a refugee in a war-torn country.’” Stories also offer a separation that can provide comfort, allowing readers to fully engage with a difficult topic. “You don’t realize you’re reading about racism when you’re reading about two mermaid colonies going at each other,” Dani explains.

Valerie, whose class I sat in on, first found Brink through F(r)iction. She’s a writer and appreciated that F(r)iction was less pretentious than other literary magazines she’d submitted to. In her experience, the publishing world could be hostile toward anyone not coming from an elevated arts background. “I was seeking out places that felt like they would genuinely welcome me, not just tolerate my presence,” she says.

Still, as a member of an MFA program, she knew she had opportunities that other writers didn’t have. Even the formatting can be intimidating if you don’t have anyone guiding you through the language of cover letters and different modes of querying. Without mentorship or a formal education structure, mainstream publishing is accessible to the privileged few.

There’s an expectation in publishing that you’ll come to the table with all the skills required. In contrast, Brink operates with the expectation that you come with something important to say. You might not have every single skill or tool you’ll need, so they’ll help you along the way.

While Val first appreciated F(r)iction for that accessibility, she also admired its effervescence. While literary publications sometimes reminded her of a “white gallery wall,” F(r)iction was designed to be a multi-sensory experience. Stories are paired with professional illustrators and every page teems with life.

“Storytelling is not the written word. We were sitting around campfires and telling stories and connecting through that long before the written word was created,” Val muses. “And so I felt that when I looked at F(r)iction, there was something about it that acknowledged the reality of being a human in the world more than other magazines did.”

“Also, it’s just cool. It’s cool looking. The stories are weird.”

At its heart, F(r)iction exists to do the same thing the Frames Comic Program does: bring healing and connection through storytelling.

Many issues of F(r)iction include a student comic, and an anthology of purely student comics is on the horizon. Val sees these as a way for students to take difficult or traumatic topics, things that aren’t always socially acceptable to talk about, and “wrap it in something weird, or metaphorical, symbolic, genre—they’re suddenly able to hold on to it and explain it and connect with people.”

“They can take these really horrible experiences that they’ve had,” she continues, “and transform it into something that anybody can relate to. So students who have done things some of us can’t even imagine doing can write stories that any person can pick up and be like, I get that. I can relate to that.”

Val gives me a firsthand example of how listening to her students’ stories has impacted her perspective. One of the first classes she taught was to a group of men who had all recently left prison. One young man relayed his experience of being taught to create some kind of illicit substance by his uncle when he was quite young. And as he recalled it, she noticed a fond look on his face.

The man admitted he’d felt pride, because he was finally someone others could rely on. He was learning a skill and being initiated into something that was a rite of passage.

Others started saying, “Yeah, me too,” Val remembers. “Oh, my dad taught me how to do this when I was 10, or I started dealing when I was 12. My uncle taught me how to do that when I was seven. And they’re all talking about it, and they’re starting to share these moments of connection and male role models.”

If you had replaced the illicit substance with almost anything else in the story, it would have been a beautiful experience of being brought into a community, taught how to survive, and take care of others.

And while this same skill is what led many of them to prison, Val says, “That just completely reframed my understanding of what was going on within justice-impacted communities, because I couldn’t really understand for a long time why so many people were drawn to such dangerous and potentially malicious business practices. If you’re the son of a high-powered businessman, you’re going to be taught how to invest. If you are born into a community where drugs are the primary source of income, then you’re going to be shown the way and nurtured within that environment. So that was really impactful for me.”

That’s not to say she’s letting them off the hook. The classes also encourages participants to take accountability for their actions.

Dani recalls a student whose journey through the Frames program helped her change the story she told, not just about herself, but about how society works.

Her name was Rachel, and she was in Denver’s maximum security women’s prison for selling heroin. “She hated my stupid face,” Dani remembers with a smile, recalling that Rachel once threw a desk at her.

Rachel didn’t see a reason that she should be in prison. She saw the drug trade as an economic issue; she was providing a service that there was a demand for, just a cog in the machine.

When she was out of prison, she would stay with a family and provide the mother heroin in exchange for rent. She grew close to the eight-year-old daughter.

One day, Rachel came to class in tears. When she volunteered to share, she recounted a tragedy: the little girl had found her mother’s heroin stash.

“I watched my student break down,” Dani shares, “and realize, 'It’s not just the story that I tell about myself I need to question. I have been saying that this drug isn’t bad, or I’m not having a negative influence in the world, but if it kills this little darling that I loved so much, I don't want to be a part of it.' And that was the moment that completely changed everything for her.”

Now, Rachel’s life is headed in a new direction. “She’s an amazing welder,” Dani shares.

An important part of Brink’s curriculum centers around this sense of agency and accountability. Val asks students to do the messy work of unpacking their past and honestly assessing their choices. Students with dichotomous thinking might believe they’re not responsible for anything they’ve done because they’re a good person or they didn’t perceive that they had other choices. Or they might believe they are responsible for everything they’ve done in their past, so they don’t deserve redemption. But those narratives don’t leave room for growth or for the nuances of human emotion and behavior.

Val helps her students see they are responsible for their choices and they may have been dealt an unfair hand. “Gaining that awareness of what kind of power we have, what kind of responsibility we have, and what we can change is the key to unlocking transformation,” she says. “The moment that we realize we can change the story is the moment that we can start changing ourselves and our communities.”

This requires opening up to potentially uncomfortable and vulnerable conversations.

Facilitators have to establish safety and trust within a space. It’s why Brink takes hiring and training so seriously. Dani explains that teacher training goes far beyond learning to implement curriculum. They learn mindfulness tools; they read a plethora of comics and discuss why they work; they go through deescalation training.

What they try to build for each small cohort is “a safe space and a brave space,” Val says. Safe in that everyone is welcome and the emotional safety of everyone involved is their first priority. “And then a brave space is one where there is radical accountability and honesty, and you are held responsible for your actions,” Val shares. “There is justice within that space.”

Maintaining this balance is something she’s constantly aware of as an instructor. But ultimately, she gives her students a lot of credit. “Every single one of them is choosing to be brave and acknowledge their own responsibility and accountability and say, ‘I can do better than this.’ And to be in that space as a teacher is a real privilege.”

We visit one of Brink’s community partners. As we drive, we leave behind high-rises. In between train tracks and autobody shops, I see glimpses of the mountains in the distance, hazy but visible.

We’re heading to Women’s Bean Project, a non-profit providing job training and employment to women facing significant barriers to work. Named for their first product—a ten-bean soup— Women’s Bean Project has been part of the fabric of this Denver community for over thirty years. Their Alameda location houses offices, a retail store, classrooms, and a large warehouse. Looking down at the warehouse, we see women packaging subscription boxes with specialty food products.

They’re part of a cohort of women in a workforce development program that doubles as a food manufacturing company. They spend 70% of their time learning job skills and 30% in programming focused on stabilization, skill acquisition, and identifying career opportunities.

That’s where Brink comes in. Women come to the Bean Project for many reasons, but they tend to be chronically unemployed. Some have a history of involvement in the justice system, substance use, or domestic violence.

Amy Ostrowski, their Program Manager, talks about the importance of helping the women examine their own narratives. “I think a lot of times their stories have been discounted because of how they’ve grown up, or relationships that they’ve been in,” she says. “Especially, any involvement in the justice system—you’re hardly even a person, so it’s not like you have a story.”

One of the women, Nia Morrison, reflects on the Frames program and how it’s helped her think of her future differently. “If you can tell your story one way, you can change your story a million different ways,” she says. “Brink has taught me not to let one thing that you have gone through define who you’re going to be or where you’re going.”

I ask where she’s going. She wants to work for herself. “I just want generational wealth for my kids,” she says. “I don’t want them to have to work as hard as me and their dad ever in their life.”

At another partner organization, The Other Side Academy—a training school that teaches social, vocational, and life skills to help participants bring about sustainable life change—I meet Eric Boylan. He has finished the Frames program and his pitch was just accepted for publication. Over the next few months, he’ll be working with a scriptwriter and professional illustrator to finalize the copy. He reads me his comic pitch, a memoir that uses Mexican folklore to explore the temptation to stay in the drug game.

“Is destiny written in the stars, or do you have the power to weave it with your own hands? In the true tale of Milagro, In a forgotten corner of the world, nestled in the heart of a desolate desert, there lay a small dusty town called La Tira. The town was a place of shadows, where the land itself seemed to breathe a curse,” he begins, narrating in a rich, clear voice.

By the end, I have chills.

Brink’s partnerships with organizations like Women’s Bean Project and The Other Side Academy stem from their objective to go beyond individual transformation and heal communities.

“It doesn’t matter if we ran the single most incredible, innovative prison program in the entire world. If society doesn’t want to believe in second chances, if we don’t have policy that encourages that, if we don’t have a world where we’re like, yeah, we can help you reintegrate—it doesn’t matter,” Dani says.

There are a multitude of reasons people become justice-impacted, and it would be shortsighted to focus on personal agency without also addressing the factors that inhibit people from acting in their own best interests.

“There’ve been so many times I’ve sat in a justice secretary’s office and they’re like, ‘Dani, all we need to do is get these people jobs.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, step one, do they want the jobs? Do they have the resilience to stay in the jobs when they’re hard?’” She simplifies it in her signature Dani way: “Humans need human stuff first.”

The day after the Frames comic class, I return to the library, a historic building in a neighborhood of closely-built Victorians that have seen better days, with peeling fish-scale shingles adorning steeply pitched rooflines in faded pinks and blues. I’m meeting two students, brothers named Bey and Vishnu Gonzales.

Vishnu rides his bike to the library. Bey shows up a little while later on a skateboard. Both are bright and charismatic, oozing confidence when you get them talking about their art.

After what he described as a rough childhood (“I had behavioral issues—not to take away from the fact that I’m a genius,” he tosses into conversation with a grin), Bey found his identity as a five-sport athlete. It was the summer before his senior year that he discarded that label and leaned into photography. But he sees the true turning point as when he was able to let other people in. “It was that moment right there where I was like, okay, I could totally just keep trying to act like I’m some solo artist,” he tells me. “I just chose to really start involving people, to be inclusive with my community artistically.”

Vishnu, too, sees himself as a vital member of his community. After being shot at the age of 14 in an incident of gang-related violence, he says, “I was scared to go outside. I had PTSD,” he recalls. “I had to heal. And then I found music. I just really fell in love with writing music.”

He has a new project coming out soon. When he tells us about it, he says he’s striving to bring people together. “East side of Denver is the staple of Colorado,” he says. “This is the area where the real story’s happening.” He’s becoming an integral part of that story. At one point, he peels off his sweatshirt to reveal the t-shirt underneath—bearing the logo of another non-profit where he’s just come from teaching chess. “Community and unity is what I want to see on the East side of Denver.”

Community change is also an area Brink has identified for growth, what they consider a middle layer—in between the individual change that happens in the classroom and higher-level policy advocacy. What students care about, it turns out, is having people in their own communities understand them.

As one of Dani’s students pointed out—"if my teachers, future employers, estranged parents don’t know that I don’t sleep in a bed at night, that I don’t often have enough food, that my past gang involvement has been from necessity because I’m taking care of my parents—how are we going to create change?”

To that end, they launched their first community event in March—an immersive storytelling experience in which students read their comics accompanied by music and animation.

"If I’m a student," Helen imagines, “I’m doing a release event and I’m sharing as someone from my community, with other members of my community—often multiple of us are just as impacted. And so we see how storytelling then ricochets out from this thing I did in the classroom.”

"And if I’m a reader," she explains, “I’m receiving this, I’m engaging with it, my perceptions have been challenged around what it means to have been incarcerated. And that kind of slowly moves the needle in this wider societal perception.”

Like Bey and Vishnu, another one of Brink’s students, Jay Cook, sees himself as instrumental in changing that perception. “I like to say the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and I was pretty damn close to the problem,” Jay says. “I was the problem. So now I like to consider myself the solution.”

What are those solutions? “For the BIPOC community, violence disruption and mental health pathways,” he says. “If you give these kids an outlet to express themselves, that instantly creates less violence. There’s violence when there’s nothing to do, when there’s a constant struggle, when there’s no outlet. So we definitely create that outlet, and what we’re doing with our future pathway creations is giving students opportunity to grow in the company, opportunity to grow personally.”

Not all students take on permanent roles with Brink like Jay has—now the Community Engagement Liaison—but there are other ways to stay involved. For one thing, some stay on as student advisors, a paid position in which they act as advocates and co-facilitators. “We just kind of Pokemon level collect them all,” Dani jokes. “So, yeah, if you want to stay involved with us, we keep you forever.”

When I wrap my conversation with Jay, I ask if there’s anything else he wants to tell me. “You didn’t ask me when my comic comes out. It comes out March 15th,” he says, beaming.

“Globally and all the Barnes and Nobles, you know what I mean?” he adds, talking about the distribution of F(r)iction, which featured his own story in its most recent edition. “And I didn’t even used to go to the library.”