After Dorothy Gillen lost her son Scott in 2015 to drug addiction, she needed an outlet to heal. While preparing for an overdose awareness event in 2019, she thought it would be impactful to have posters of lost loved ones displayed behind the speakers. The Black Poster Project was born.
“…we travel around New York and New Jersey areas and we set up hundreds of posters,” said Gillen. The project, which started with just 50 posters, now has nearly 700 on display, showing the many faces and stories of people around the country who died due to addiction. The goal is to educate people on the addiction crisis, to bring healing to families who are grieving loved ones and to keep alive the memories of those who died.
“Every poster, every child, every loved one has a story,” said lead volunteer Glynis Burke. Burke lost her son Patrick to addiction in 2019, and found The Black Poster Project while looking for ways to cope with her grief.
“…people have a tendency to think that people taking drugs or dying from drugs or overdoses, that they deserve it,” said Gillen, “that they made a choice that they should be gone. But these people didn’t want to die. They made a mistake. … Some just couldn’t control where they were going, like my son. They never thought that the end of their life was going to be at the end of a needle.”
