How A Smile Changed Everything For Musician Brad Corrigan
Nonprofit Love Light + Melody serves vulnerable children on the front lines of crisis and poverty
Photo courtesy of Jensen Sutta
You might know of this Colorado native—a talented musician and member of the wildly popular roots rock band Dispatch. But what you see on stage is just a piece of what makes Brad Corrigan rock. For this singer, songwriter and drummer, motivation and passion now come from 3,000 miles away.
Dispatch rose to fame in the early 2000s, playing shows all over the United States. After sold-out shows at Red Rocks, three in a row at Madison Square Garden and then a farewell concert in Boston in 2004 for an estimated 150,000 people, the band broke up until 2011. Then, last summer, Dispatch played a sold-out show at Red Rocks with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.
Photo courtesy of Jensen Sutta
Today, however, Corrigan’s heart beats faster when he is off the stage talking about his many friends and fans far from Colorado.
On the coast of Nicaragua sits a 3-square-kilometer trash dump called La Chureca. Corrigan visited Nicaragua in 2005 and 2006 and ended up in La Chureca, a barrio in the capital city of Managua where hundreds of families make their home, scavenging daily for recyclables to collect and sell. It is in this brutal landscape that Corrigan had a life-altering encounter, meeting a young girl—Ileana—“with a lightning smile.”
A portrait of Ileana taken in 2006 while Corrigan was visiting Nanagua, Nicaragua. | Photo courtesy of Brad Corrigan
Corrigan shared, “That’s the moment where I was about to make my escape, rolling up the window and locking the doors. I was thinking to myself, ‘What could I possibly do here?’ I felt really unsafe. So, there I was moving into self-preservation mode,” he says, “letting fear take over, when Ileana tapped on the window, laughing and smiling.” He recounts rolling the window down and talking to this young girl, who invited him to see her “new house” and “new bike” and meet her family.
Photo courtesy of Luiz Maximiano
Once he got to know Ileana and her family, he was hooked: He started visiting Nicaragua on a regular basis. He would bring clothing and supplies, anything he could do to help the families living in the barrio. At the same time, he was grappling with the meaning of his visits.
“For the first few years, I was thinking about how I might fix things. After stumbling and falling so many times, I learned that a community approach was critical,” Corrigan says. “I realized the importance of thinking from a we versus us and them perspective.”
Photo courtesy of Jensen Sutta
Beginning with an egotistical Western approach to go to a place as a problem-solver, he eventually learned that listening and supporting local leadership was the only way to create change. Corrigan even questioned if he might be a part of the problem.
He started bringing others to see this corner of the world—taking team trips to Nicaragua and documenting his visits in the hope that one day Ileana and her sister Mercedes would leave La Chureca and tell their story to others. “They were so intelligent and brave, and we thought it would be good to document their lives and that they would raise awareness for themselves,” says Corrigan.
But the story of Ileana and Mercedes took a very hard and unexpected turn, when like so many young and vulnerable kids in La Chureca, the sisters started using drugs and were exposed to physical and sexual abuse. Mercedes died of HIV/AIDS in 2009, and Ileana died shortly thereafter.
Photo courtesy of Jensen Sutta
After their passing, Corrigan struggled, wondering if the story of the sisters and of La Chureca was his to tell. He questioned if this was the end of the journey. Listening to him talk about the deeper meaning of his experience, you could not help but think of the lyrics from “The General”: “Is this fight worth fighting for?”
The answer for Corrigan was a resounding yes. A friend asked him one day if he remembered Ileana’s smile, and its memory was again a turning point. He co-founded Love Light + Melody, a nonprofit serving vulnerable children on the front lines of crisis and poverty in Nicaragua and beyond.
Since its inception, Love Light + Melody has raised millions of dollars for scholarships to students, and the nonprofit recently finished a documentary called Ileana’s Smile, which debuted at the Denver Film Festival last autumn. The organization worked with local leaders to build a primary school in La Chureca, with the dream of building a high school in the coming years. Corrigan is currently working on a platform where musicians can write and donate songs—and the money from streaming and listening can be directed to Ileana’s School of Hope.
As a viewer, it is impossible to unsee the images that you see in the film—but it’s also hard to miss the irony that there can be such beauty in the middle of a trash dump. Most of all, it is impossible to forget Ileana’s smile and the hopes and dreams that jump out at you from the film. What Corrigan and his 20 years of working to fight poverty make clear is that the fight is so worth fighting for, and that it extends far beyond one battle or one location. The bigger fight is about seeing and listening—and, in this case, it was born out of a simple smile.
Lindsey Schwartz is a national television journalist for 20/20 on ABC News and has covered crime for news magazines on NBC, CBS and ABC News. Schwartz has three kids, two of them in college, and lives in Denver with her fiancé and two dogs.
