Speak Your Silence: An Interview with Founder, Matt Pipkin

Speak Your Silence is a nonprofit on a mission to conquer the stigma of child sexual abuse. Today, I’m interviewing founder, Matt Pipkin.

Tell us about your present-day life—where you live, your family, etc. Who is Matt Pipkin?

My wife, Ashley, and I live in downtown Boise, Idaho, which we love. It’s our hometown and our families live here (except my sister and her husband, who live in North Carolina). Ash does corporate sales for a very nice hotel in a resort town two hours north of Boise, called McCall. She’s there a couple days a week and then works remotely from home the rest of the week. I, on the other hand, walk to the office, which is just a couple blocks from home.

Lately, I’ve been going to McCall with Ash as much as possible. It’s a great little town where I can work from the coffee shop, but relax a little bit, being as I’m in the mountains. We love Idaho.

Can you share a little bit—whatever your comfortable sharing—with us about your childhood?

I come from a really great family and always knew that I was loved. However, when I was 6, I was sexually abused by a trusted family friend. He was 17 and the son of someone my dad flew fighter jets with in the Guard. We also went to church with his family, had BBQs, you name it.

He was my friend, so I saw myself as an accomplice to what happened—something I didn’t have words to explain with my 6-year-old vocabulary. What I did know, however, was that what we were doing was bad and if my parents found out, they’d be devastated.

Therefore, a simple, but very powerful lie took root in my heart: that I was bad.

This resulted in years of intense fear, which showed its face in the form of anxiety, panic attacks, and headaches, among other things.

After 20 years of silence, what was it that prompted you to tell your parents what happened when you were a child?

That’s actually the abridged version I tell publicly, because the full version is often too long to tell. I actually first shared with my parents when I was 14 years old, simply because I was having the worst panic attack of my life and couldn’t take it any more. However, it wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I finally shared with them the full extent of what happened. Until then, they thought it was a fairly minor, isolated incident. I was too afraid to tell them otherwise.

When I did finally open up, it came at a time when I’d just had my heart broken and was at a low point in life. I was writing in my journal at the Denver airport, feeling so frustrated that I was still dealing with panic attacks. In that moment, a light turned on in my mind and I finally made a connection between the panic attacks I was now experiencing as an adult and the fact that they first began the day I told my first lie to cover up what I’d done. I then picked up my phone and called my mom to tell her.

How did sharing your story for the first time impact your life?

Two things happened: 1) I felt an enormous relief—a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, and I felt the warmth of knowing I could now openly talk with my parents without fear, because they overwhelmed me with love, and 2) I cried about my experience for the first time in my life. The tears flowed.

How did Speak Your Silence come into being? How did you come up with the idea to help fund counseling for abuse survivors?

My counselor changed my life. He helped me recognize a very simple truth—that I’m infinitely valuable, and no one—myself included—can ever take away from that. I then realized the same is true of every single person I meet. So, I wanted to share with others the freedom I now have.

I founded Speak Your Silence with the same mission we have today: to conquer the stigma of child sexual abuse. However, I had no solid plan at all for how to fulfill it. I simply knew the social dynamics surrounding this issue must first change before we’ll ever be truly effective in preventing sexual abuse or restoring the lives of those already affected, such as my own.

Our counseling program was simply meant to be. It resulted from a meeting that I almost cancelled the day-of with a person I’d never met (Sarah Woodley, the CEO of BPA Health, the company we’ve been partnered with ever since, which implements our entire counseling program nationwide).

Our counseling program was a solution to a key problem: our mission is very intangible and hard to measure. Counseling 1) is something I’m passionate about from personal experience and 2) offers a very tangible, measurable way for people to support our efforts. So, while funding counseling is not WHY we exist, it’s a very valuable program that’s supportive of our mission, is changing lives, and largely incentivizes our supporters.

How does the process work when a survivor connects with Speak Your Silence in search of counseling? Is counseling funded for a specific length of time? Can you give us an overview of how it all works?

100% of public donations + profits from The Stitch fund our counseling program.

Anyone directly affected by child sexual abuse (or parents/guardians of a child directly affected) can apply confidentially on our website. It’s a very simple application, and applicants can give as little or as much personal information as they’d like.

From there, a designated member of our awesome team at BPA Health is the point of contact for the applicant/grantee. Our program is offered for anyone—whether you need help to afford counseling, have insurance to help cover cost, or can fully afford counseling on your own and simply need a referral—you can apply. For grantees, we require a per-session copay, because personal buy-in is very important; however, we ask each applicant to state what he or she can afford.

We do our best to give each grantee or referral a few options for counselors (this can be somewhat limited in rural areas, of course), because we know that counseling is not one-size-fits-all. So, if a grantee sees a counselor who is not a fit, we absolutely understand and want them to tell us, because we want them to see someone who is an awesome fit for them.

Counseling grants begin with an authorization for ten counseling sessions, and can be extended to an additional five sessions if requested by the provider. So, while our program is not a solution for long-term therapy, we’ve found that each grantee attends a total of approximately ten sessions.

I love the whole idea of The Stitch. How was it born?

An image popped into my mind during a Board Retreat of a guy with an orange zigzag stitched into the front right pocket of his jeans. I knew it was either the best or dumbest idea I’d ever had, so I sheepishly explained it to the group…and none of us were sure about it.

I sat on the idea for a few months, asked a few people their thoughts, and then tested it with some friends. I loved that the zigzag physically symbolizes your voice frequency when you wear it, and it could be added to any item you wear—whether a shirt, a bag, a hat, you name it. By wearing it, you could show support for people you loved to share their stories, and without salvaging your sense of style. It wasn’t tacky, as so many cause symbols are.

We test marketed the idea in fall of 2013 by hosting a very small event at a local coffee shop, equipped with sewing machines and studio photo lighting. We invited people to bring their article(s) of clothing to have The Stitch sewn onto. To establish value and gauge interest, we charged $5 per stitch, and once a person had their piece of clothing stitched, they’d stand in front of a camera for a picture we’d then post to social media using #TheStitch hashtag.

We ended up with a line out the door of people waiting to get The Stitch, and most people had The Stitch sewn onto multiple items.

From there, we knew we needed to make the idea far more scalable so that people anywhere could have The Stitch without requiring us to sew it for them. So, we publicly launched The Stitch in March of 2014 with our first product, The Stitch kit, which retailed for $20. In September of 2014, we recreated The Stitch kit, now retailing for $5, and dramatically increased the number of people wearing The Stitch.

And now you’ve expanded The Stitch into a clothing line. What do you foresee as the next steps for The Stitch?

Yes, that happened this past September when we broadened our offering further with a clothing line under the brand of The Stitch, removing even more barriers for people to be part of our community and wear The Stitch. The Stitch clothing line is big for us in that it makes it so much easier to scale the idea of The Stitch and reach so many more people. We’re still very small, so we’re only manufactured in small volume thus far. However, as sales increase, we plan to eventually sell wholesale to retail shops and boutiques to carry our line and reach new audiences.

In truth, our growth and impact is largely dependent upon our supporters wearing The Stitch and sharing about it—in person and on social media. As our community continues to grow, our ability to reach more and more lives will also increase exponentially.

Where would you like to see Speak Your Silence go from here? Can you share any future plans with us?

2016 will largely be about growing our community, expanding the reach and adoption of The Stitch, and sharing powerful individual stories of impact. When people wear The Stitch, they directly fulfill our mission. As it grows, the profits from The Stitch will make it possible for us to keep up with the ever-increasing demand we experience for our counseling program.

How can our readers get involved? Is there anything they can do even if they’re not abuse survivors?

The Stitch is not simply to be worn by those directly affected by child sexual abuse, but by all of us. Imagine you’re in room surrounded by people you love and you have a story you’ve never shared before, due to fear, shame, and guilt. How much safer would you feel sharing your story if every single person in that room was wearing The Stitch?

There are lots of ways to be part of the Speak Your Silence mission and community:

~By wearing The Stitch, showing support for people you love to share their stories.

~By becoming a member of The Fam for $5+ per month, which exclusively funds in-person, one-on-one counseling. (We haven’t yet hit our goal of funding 500 counseling sessions this year via The Fam.)

~By becoming a member of The Loudspeaker for $100+ per month, which exclusively funds our staff, ops, and growth of The Stitch and The Fam.

~By sharing about us on social media and inviting friends to follow us. (You’d be amazed how many followers we can gain simply be one person inviting all their friends.)

And here I am wearing mine.

Thanks so much, Matt, for joining us and sharing Speak Your Silence and The Stitch.