Danna Villafane knows something about resilience. We talked to her the week she had been released from the controversial Lincoln Hills/Copper Lake juvenile detention facility in northern Wisconsin. It was a “bad place,” she said. Danna had been in the system since she was 12 and went to Lincoln Hills when she was 14. She did what she could to help other girls cope while she was there, she told us. On the day of her interview, she huddled up with her adoptive mom, Sharlen Moore, the director of Urban Underground and also a subject in this project. They used a recorder we had dropped at their doorstep back in the early days of Covid-19. Danna hadn’t thought a lot about democracy and her relationship to it before our interview, at least not in those terms. But she had a lot of insight about “the system” and its impact on her life. Danna, who was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States at a young age with her parents, isn’t precisely sure what her future holds or where she wants to place her energies. But her desire to make change is palpable. She has a lot of plans, including going to college and a possible career in social work. Her challenging past and her capacity to get through it is her superpower. Those experiences have given her wisdom and have inspired her to help other women and girls realize they can overcome the conditions they find themselves in, too. “If you put your mind to it you can achieve it,” she said. We left a little of the mother-daughter exchange in our edited clip, the only time we didn’t edit out extra voices in this project. You’ll see why when you listen to the full interview.