Voices UnBroken believes in and nurtures the creative voice in all people.
Voices UnBroken helps participants identify dreams and goals.
Voices UnBroken respects, values and cares for our participants.
Voices UnBroken identifies and fosters leadership.
Voices UnBroken workshops focus on the belief that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.
Voices UnBroken is a non-judgmental organization. We value every person's right to self-identify and we do our best to work with people's judgments about the work we do and the people we serve.
Voices UnBroken is accountable to our participants and to our community.
Voices UnBroken is learning organization that is committed to documenting and evaluating our programs.
Voices UnBroken expects greatness!

Dalinez Martinez-Lanzo
Board President
JPMorganChase

Caridad "La Bruja" De La Luz
Poet and Performer

Sharon Nunez

Victoria Sammartino
Voices UnBroken

Andrea M. Schaffer
CityMatters

Leslie Smith
Boys and Girls Clubs of America

Matthew S. Washington
Friends of the High School for Environmental Studies

Victoria Sammartino
Founder & Executive Director
victoria@voicesunbroken.org

Milagros Acosta
Program Director
mimi@voicesunbroken.org

Past and Current Supporters of Voices UnBroken Include:
New York City Council Member Annabel Palma
New York City Council Member Joel Rivera
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer
New York State Council on the Arts
New York State Department of State
The National Endowment for the Arts
The New York City Department of Youth & Community Development (DYCD)
The NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA)
The Bronx Council on the Arts
The David Rockefeller Fund
The Durst Family Foundation
The Nathan Cummings Foundation
The New York Women's Foundation
The New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund
The Simón Bolívar Foundation
The Taproot Foundation
The Three Bridge Fund/Lindsay Shea
The Tides Foundation
The Union Square Awards
The Wyman Foundation
Sims Metal Management
TD Bank
Con Edison
Every Day Supply Company
The Chazen Companies
The US Census Bureau
Verizon
Waste Management
& Donations from Individuals Like You!

Milagros Acosta
Program Director

Milagros Acosta (Mimi) is Voices UnBroken's Full-Time Program Director. Raised in The Bronx, Mimi attended Lehman High School and Lehman College where she majored in Psychology and Sociology. She is a self-taught poet and has studied dance professionally at Starlight Studios and Pasarella School of Performing Arts for the past fifteen years.

At the age of 12, she started her own dance troupe and since 2004 she has danced with Hip Hop Theory, a hip-hop dance troupe that is based in Lehman College. She has performed at various locations ranging from The Brooklyn Academy of Music to local street fairs and benefits. From 2002 until earlier this year, Mimi worked for Good Shepherd Services, one of Voices UnBroken's partners. She initially worked as an Activity Instructor at one of Good Shepherd's after-school programs and was promoted to Recreational Specialist at Euphrasian Hall, a residential diagnostic reception center for adolescent girls.

She has been trained in various youth development models, including the Sanctuary Model, which is now being used in many of the restrictive residential settings where Voices UnBroken workshops take place.

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Dalinez Martinez-Lanzo
Board President
JP Morgan Chase

Dali was born in the Dominican Republic and came to The Bronx when she was 8 years old. She attended grade school and high school in The Bronx and graduated from Columbia College (a college within Columbia University) where she majored in Economics & Math, with a concentration in Creative Writing. She is currently the board president of Voices UnBroken and works for JPMorgan Chase as a Finance Associate in the Asset Management line of Business. She married her high school sweetheart and lives in the Parkchester area of the Bronx.

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Caridad "La Bruja" De La Luz
Poet and Performer

Caridad De La Luz is a Bronx-born Performer known as LA BRUJA, considered one of America's leading spoken word artists. She is a renaissance woman, NY Times called her "a Juggernaut" after her 2009 run of her musical Boogie Rican Blvd. where she played 7 different characters alongside a small supporting cast that included her 10 year old daughter, Carina.

Her acting career has taken her from the stage to films, she has appeared in several movies including Bamboozled, Down to the Bone, El Vacilon and Gun Hill Road. Her unique music has crossed over internationally with her debut album "Brujalicious", and her newest release "For Witch It Stands" both available on iTunes. In 2011, she published her first collection of poetry, “The Poetician”. And she is perhaps best known for her captivating performance on Russell Simmons' HBO Def Poetry Jam. Caridad is also the Founder of the Latinas 4 Life spoken word movement and is a board member of Voices UnBroken.

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Sharon Nunez

Sharon is an artist and a youth worker who was born and raised in The Bronx, where she still makes her home. She facilitates mixed media arts workshops at the Children’s Aid Society’s Next Generation Center, where she is known for engaging hard-to-reach youth. She began volunteering with Voices UnBroken in 2005, and joined the board in 2010.

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Victoria Sammartino
Voices UnBroken
Founder & Executive Director

The Full-Time Executive Director of Voices UnBroken is Victoria Sammartino, the organization's Founder. Victoria (Tory) is a Bronx native who participated in a number of youth programs as a teenager, including CityKids and The Ella Baker/Cleveland Robinson Academy (run by the NYS Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission and Institute for NonViolence). She began keeping a journal as a child and has traveled around the country facilitating writing workshops and performing her own poetry.

Tory holds a BA in Community Arts from Bennington College, and in 2001 she was awarded a Union Square Award for the work of Voices UnBroken. In 2005, she received a Robert Bowne Foundation Practitioner-Research Fellowship and spent a year researching the impact of arts programming on incarcerated youth. From 2009-2010 she participated in the We Are The Bronx Fellowship, a program of CAUSE-NY. And in 2010, she participated in the Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare: Multi-System Integration Certificate Program for Private Sector Leaders run by Georgetown University's Center for Juvenile Justice Reform.

Tory is a member of the Community Justice Network for Youth (a program of the W. Hayward Burns Institute), the Juvenile Justice Coalition (a program of the Correctional Association of New York), and the Prison Arts Coalition. She is also a member of the NYC Department of Juvenile Justice's Resident Advocacy Program Committee, a committee that provides civilian oversight for NYC's secure and non-secure detention facilities, and the NYC Youth Board.

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Andrea M. Schaffer
CityMatters

Andrea M. Schaffer brings over 30 years of experience managing projects that entail the development and integration of environmental practices and policies into companies' overall corporate strategy, culture and operations or managing projects that require the complex interplay of regulatory agencies and the businesses that do work in NYC.

Ms. Schaffer offers strategic guidance to her clients and takes charge of the day-to-day tasks of managing a project. She is the pivotal person who coordinates the work of various technical specialists. She has an acute understanding of the inner workings of City government, the legislative process, and has the skills needed to manage the diverse set of entities that link a project together. www.citymattersllc.biz

Ms. Schaffer is a member of 3 non-profit Boards. Her Board work is integral to her professional life. She has recruited her private clients to support the work of all 3 organizations. The services she provides by serving on non-profit Boards, motivates and inspires her.

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Leslie Smith
Boys and Girls Clubs of America

Leslie Adrianne Smith was born in Arizona and has a History degree from Pomona College and a Reading Specialist degree from Teacher’s College. She has been working in the youth development and education field for 17 years and wrote her first book of poetry in 4th grade. She was the founding Board President of Voices UnBroken and has been involved with the organization since she met Tory at an open mic in Boston in 1999. She currently works for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

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Matthew S. Washington
Friends of the High School for Environmental Studies

Matthew became the Executive Director of Friends of the High School for Environmental Studies in August 2010. Prior to joining Friends of HSES, he served as Deputy Director of the Friends of Hudson River Park where he had worked for 6 years in various positions involving educational programming and fundraising for the Park. Matthew is also a graduate from the High School for Environmental Studies. He earned has a bachelor’s degree from Alfred University in Comparative Cultures with a concentration in Cultural Anthropology. He served as a volunteer mentor for 3 years with the Urban Youth Alliance’s BronxConnect program, which is an alternative to incarceration program for youth ages 12 – 18. Matthew joined Voices UnBroken’s board of directors in 2010 after attending just one fundraiser for because of how inspired he was by the work of the organization, and by the voices of the young people it serves. In addition to his involvement with Voices UnBroken Matthew is also the Chairman of Manhattan’s Community Board 11, serving East Harlem and he is a member of the Board of Directors of El Barrio's Operation Fightback and the NYC Chapter of the New York League of Conservation Voters.