Ellen Spiro

The documentary film Troop 1500 focuses on five girl scouts and their incarcerated moms. Julia Cuba’96 (back row, in blue) leads this special scout troop.

Beyond their interests in badges, sing-alongs, and summer camp, the girl scouts who belong to Troop 1500 have at least one other thing in common: Their moms have been incarcerated in a central Texas prison.

But to social worker and troop leader Julia Cuba’96, these girls—at least in one profound way—are the fortunate ones.

As members of this special Girl Scout troop, the girls—aged 6 to 17—work to rebuild fractured relationships with their moms, in part, through monthly visits to Hilltop Prison in Gatesville, Texas. They benefit from therapy and case management, even after they become alumnae of the troop. And they are like daughters to a tenacious circle of Austin, Texas, women who look out for them as mentors and role models.

Compared with other children whose parents are doing time in prison, they are lucky, but only in relative terms. They have a good shot at breaking a cycle of crime and imprisonment that has torn apart their lives. 

Troop 1500’s overall goal is to keep the girls from repeating their moms’ mistakes, and Cuba says that threat is real. The children of incarcerated parents are six to eight times more likely than other kids to become imprisoned themselves as adults.

Under the auspices of the Girl Scouts-Lone Star Council, Cuba founded this progressive Austin-based program eight years ago. It is one of only two such troops in Texas under the Enterprising Girl Scouts Beyond Bars program. About 40 of these special troops exist nationally, but Troop 1500 is one of a select few that takes a holistic approach to addressing the issues of children with parents in prison.

At the center of the troop’s tightly woven web of support for the girls and their families are Cuba and the Girl Scouts organization, which expands its services through its partner agencies—the Austin YWCA, the University of Texas-Austin School of Social Work, and the Austin-based Crime Prevention Institute.

If this story has a familiar ring, it is probably because of the award-winning documentary film Troop 1500, which thrust Cuba and five of the girls and their moms into the national spotlight over the past year.

Besides making the film-festival rounds (including in Beloit’s inaugural international film festival last January), the movie has propelled the girls’ story onto the pages of national magazines, such as People and O, and onto the airwaves through the award-winning public radio program This American Life. The documentary film made its television debut last March on Independent Lens, public television’s premier independent film series.

Sitting in her Austin home one morning, Cuba sipped coffee from a Beloit College mug and recounted—still incredulously—how she came to work for the Girl Scouts in the first place, an organization she had previously considered “sort of bureaucratic, conservative, and potentially religious.”

After seeing a blind ad for a job to create curriculum for female inmates and their daughters, Cuba applied, was invited for an interview, and discovered the employer was the Lone Star Council of Girl Scouts.

“It turns out that they were these really progressive women who were functioning in the real world. And that was pretty radical to me,” Cuba recalls.

A creative writing and literary studies major at Beloit, Cuba first moved to Chicago shortly after graduating. She knew she wanted to attend graduate school eventually, and just this year, she finished her master’s degree in social work at the University of Texas. But early on in Chicago, she yearned for practical experience working with women’s issues, a passion she discovered at Beloit.

In her first three years out of Beloit, she worked for seven different agencies that focused on a variety of women’s issues, including as a counselor for women who ended up in hospital emergency rooms after they had been raped. “I was being educated on a theoretical level about world issues, but at the same time I was having practical interactions with people who were experiencing a very feminist issue, which is power and control,” says Cuba. “So I think I walked out of Chicago with this feeling that I had to do something.”

After moving to Austin, Cuba signed up for an independent studies course at the University of Texas, which sparked her interest in the issues of incarcerated women. Then the ad for the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars program appeared. Cuba was hired to get the project off the ground by implementing the troop and developing and running the partnership between interconnected agencies.

Only 24 at the time, Cuba committed all of her energy to the program, and the next thing she knew she was walking into Hilltop Prison like she’d been doing it her entire life. “I did a lot of things like following moms after they were released back into their crack houses and just sort of got this massive crash course from growing up with that program,” Cuba says.  

The Girl Scouts eventually put her in charge of an entire department of outreach programs, some of which Cuba designed herself. Among them are scout programs for all sorts of different populations—girls who live in public housing, pregnant teens and teen-moms, girls who are clinically psychotic or have other behavioral problems, girls on probation, and teens who are incarcerated themselves. 

Gay Shackelford

Julia Cuba’96 (right) talks with Zybra, a member of Troop 1500, at the troop’s car wash fund-raiser in Austin, Texas.

On a warm Texas evening in May, Cuba and members of Troop 1500 assembled with their mentors in the parking lot of a downtown Austin bookstore. At the troop’s last official meeting of the school year, they were holding a car wash to raise money for their annual summer trip.

To lure customers into the car wash, the girls carefully hand-lettered posters and hung bright balloons, but their efforts were hardly necessary. With the amount of publicity the troop received prior to the event, a string of cars started lining up before the hoses were ready. The first customer, who read about the fundraiser in the local newspaper, wrote out a check for $50. Generous supporters continued appearing throughout the night until the troop raised more than $700 in just under two hours.

In between washing and rinsing, some of the girls chatted about the troop and talked about their dreams. Zybra, a ninth-grader, says she likes the trips she’s been able to take with Troop 1500 and especially likes the Star Program, which “teaches you how to respect other people.” Her plans for the future are wide open: She wants to be either a fashion model, a basketball player, or a pediatrician.

Mikaela says she loves kittens and wouldn’t mind being a vet someday, but she’s also considering being a lawyer because “they get to help everyone out in times of need, just like people help me out.” A precocious 12-year-old, Mikaela exemplifies the way the girls in Troop 1500 simultaneously inhabit the worlds of childhood and adulthood. Wearing a lime green T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Girl Scouts. Where Girls Grow Strong,” Mikaela squealed, chased her best friend, and got into several water fights. But she also directed cars into the car wash, greeted customers, and deftly handled questions on camera from a broadcast journalist who wanted to tell the girls’ story on the evening news.

Gay Shackelford

With their moms in and out of prison, best friends Kiara (left) and Mikaela face tough issues, but they have each other and Troop 1500.

Cuba says that most of the girls move through a cycle of development with the troop that starts when they’re very young, and they feel guilty because their mom is gone. “The kids are carrying around all this grief and guilt about what mom may have done,” Cuba says.

After spending time with their moms at the prison, they begin to get aggravated, because they’re starting to realize their mothers made choices that did not necessarily put them first. “They come to this place where they’re really angry and that’s usually around middle school, and I think it’s at that point that the troop is most critical, because we give them an opportunity to channel their feelings,” explains Cuba.

Together with their moms, the girls learn how to build trust and communication and relationship skills. They do activities like role-playing and art therapy, and gradually, the bond between a girl and her mom strengthens.

“If it’s done right,” Cuba says, “the child is able to say, ‘My mom is my best friend. I’m not going to do what she did, and I’m going to have my own life, but she is my best friend.’”

With a total of 65 girls either in the troop or graduated from it, not one has followed her mom’s path to prison, and 25 of the troop’s alumnae are adults now.

“We feel like that’s a pretty impressive statistic,” says Cuba.

The film Troop 1500 is one of two noteworthy documentaries to be released about Beloiters in 2005. The Real Dirt on Farmer John features organic farmer John Peterson’72 in a film made by another Beloiter, Taggart Siegel’81. (See the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of Beloit College Magazine.)

For Julia Cuba, a chance meeting and subsequent friendship with filmmaker Ellen Spiro led to the idea of making the film. At a party, the two started talking about their work, and even though they knew they would have to clear numerous hurdles in getting approvals from prison officials, the scouts, and the families to make a film, they agreed that it was an important story to tell.

In the end, Spiro and partner filmmaker Karen Bernstein present the story of the troop without shying away from the grim reality their subjects face. But this film also carries a powerful message of hope: that people can overcome tremendous odds with perseverance and the help of others.

Before they started working on the documentary, the filmmakers volunteered for two years as troop mentors, with no guarantee that they would get the clearances to make the film. In the process of volunteering, some of the girls became much more than subjects to the filmmakers. Even now, a year after the film’s release, the two women continue to be mentors and close friends to several of the girls.

But having a film made about a select group of the girls and their moms was hardly a cakewalk. It introduced questions of privacy and confidentiality, and at times made everyone in the troop long for the days when they could just “be back holding hands and doing our thing again,” Cuba says.

Gay Shackelford

Along with its challenges, though, Cuba explains that the film presented a rare opportunity for the girls to practice with real-life issues of control, such as how much they were willing to disclose in front of a camera. 

“The film asked us all to reflect in a very creative way,” says Cuba. “So I think that having the cameras come into our lives gave us tools to express ourselves.”

The girls also learned how to do film editing, take cameras apart and put them back together, and, most importantly, how to use a video camera to interview their moms. Some of the most compelling footage in the film is of the girls conducting interviews with their moms during visits to Hilltop Prison. 

“There is something about sitting with your mom who has just ripped your life apart when you have the most powerful thing you’ve ever held in your hand, because it’s going to tell the truth,” Cuba says. “You get to ask whatever you want right now, and you’ve been thinking about those questions for two years while she’s been gone. And now there are a lot of people in the room, and they want to hear her answers, too. So mom has to answer, and she does, and it’s really empowering.”
Yet Cuba is a realist about the hardships the girls face. For instance, just a few weeks ago, one of the girls came home from school and found her father dead of a drug overdose.

“That really bothered me … it bothered me a lot,” Cuba says. “That is one of the most traumatic things a kid could experience. But I also know that that kid is lucky to have us, and she is going to be a tremendous person, because I see it in her now. As much sorrow as there is, there is all this other stuff, too.

“That troop is a huge privilege for all of us, no matter where we came from,” Cuba reflects. “We’re all like one big family, and it may not make everything OK, but it makes it bearable.”

Troop 1500 Featured at Homecoming Two screenings of the 65-minute film Troop 1500 are planned for a special showing in the Wilson Theatre on Friday, Sept. 15, at 3 and 9 p.m.—opening day of Homecoming/Reunion Weekend 2006. Julia Cuba’96 will be on hand to answer questions after the screenings. To find out more, go to www.alumni.beloit.edu/reunion06.

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