Cate Bourke: New Face at Tri-Town Youth Services

Cate Bourke sees a connection between the two abiding interests in her life: conceptual art that focuses on social issues and the implementation of strategies for communities to tackle problems like drug and alcohol abuse among young people. Disparate? Not to Cate, who feels that the same concerns for societal improvement underlie her involvement in both areas.

Cate is the new prevention coordinator at Tri-Town Youth Services, covering Essex, Deep River, and Chester. She works with the group's ongoing Substance Abuse Prevention Council.

The council's mission is to combat alcohol and drug abuse among young people. The group received a five-year federal government grant from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, one of 169 grantees selected from more than 500 applicants nationwide.

Previously Cate had served as a statewide community development specialist as well as a coordinator of the Violence Prevention Program at Connecticut Children's Medical Center and at the Safe Schools and Communities Coalition.

The council, made up of representatives of 12 different areas within the community, emphasizes both communal and individual attributes that are key in the fight against youth drug and alcohol abuse.

"It's an environmental approach," Cate explains.

Communities as well as individuals are assessed in terms of the number of developmental assets they possess. In all, there are 40 assets that have been identified as important in combating drug and alcohol abuse among young people. The more developmental assets that young people possess, Cate says-such as positive role models, positive family communication, and peaceful conflict resolution skills-the more likely that they won't become involved in substance abuse and other risky behaviors.

"It's what they say-it takes a village to raise a child," Cate says.

And she adds, that young people in the Tri-Town region start with a real advantage.

"Middlesex United Way has funded Healthy Community Healthy Youth initiatives throughout the county, so communities here are saturated with the developmental assets approach," she says. "That kind of support is essential to help kids thrive."

At this point, Cate describes her own role as listening, learning, and creating relationships with the people on the Substance Abuse Prevention Council and the community. Once those relationships are in place, she says, she will be in a position to provide the support the council needs to fulfill its mission.

Cate is a graduate of Trinity College in Hartford with a master's in visual arts from Vermont College, but her educational path wasn't a traditional one. She graduated from college in her mid-30s, after her two sons were born, through a degree program for older students. In her senior year, she worked part time for a company that published material on Central America, then a crucial area of the Reagan administration's foreign policy. The experience, she says, not only encouraged her interest in politics and social justice, but also, since she did graphics and layout work, stimulated her long-held interest in art.

She is a potter and longtime pottery teacher who is co-administrator of Expressive Pottery Workshop in East Granby. She is also a conceptual artist who uses pottery, among other media, to express social and political ideas. One of her pieces, Reflections on 100 Bowls of Compassion, is as its name suggests, 100 ceramic bowls, each with the name, age, and cause of death on the rim of an Iraqi civilian killed in the early days of the United States invasion. The names, however, are written in reverse and can only be read by looking in a mirror behind the installation. But when that happens, Cate points out, viewers also have to look at their own images.

At the moment, Cate has a large installation at the West Cove Gallery in New Haven called Crewel Linen: Unfinished Business, which commemorates the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York in 1911. All 146 workers at the clothing factory, many of them young immigrant women, perished in the fire because all the exits were locked. Cate's exhibition consists of 146 linen banners, each with the name of one fire's victims embroidered on it. For Cate, the installation has special meaning because some of her own forebearers, Irish immigrants, worked as dressmakers. Still, according to Cate, that family background didn't help her when she had to master enough embroidery herself to sew the victim's names on the banners. She admits she was oblivious to how difficult it would be to learn. Now she is hoping that people with needlework skills will take the time to learn about the fire victims and then embroider a fact about one of them on the appropriate linen banner as a way of involving themselves in the project.

At the moment, Cate is hoping to create an installation based on a trip to Ocotal, Nicaragua, as part of a sister cities project with East Hartford. Except for visiting Canada, Cate says the trip to Nicaragua was her first outside the United States and it made a deep impression on her.

"It reinforced my deep interest in social justice," she says. "We are experiencing financial problems and unemployment now, but in Nicaragua there is tremendous poverty and a tremendous struggle just to stay alive."

Closer to home, Cate is very excited to be working with the Tri-Town Youth Services Bureau. She says it gives her a new perspective on the substance abuse questions that she has dealt with previously. In earlier positions, she worked at the state rather than the local level.

"Now I can see what happens next," she says. "The follow through is at the community level."