View Static Version
Loading

We Are Healing: A Conversation on Art and Mental Health was born from talks between A Home Within and Journey House's Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) program. We understood that at the surface level of our work, there was overlap. In the past few years, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have shifted their approach to the arts and now have an understanding of mental health loosely tied to art practice--we wanted to tease this thread out a bit more. We wanted to get a clear understanding of why the connection between mental health and art practice exists in our work, to dive deeper than the surface.

Our project aims to raise awareness around the healing power of art by highlighting the stories of community members from both organizations: artists that have experienced foster care from Journey House’s VAPA Program, and volunteer therapists from A Home Within who work with current and former foster youth clients. These perspectives contribute to the wider conversation of healing, art therapy, art practice, the foster youth identity, and self-determination of current and former foster youth.

WHO ARE WE?

A Home Within has a mission to create and support lasting, caring relationships for children, youth, and adults who were or are in foster care. To make our mission a reality, we identify, recruit, train, and support a network of licensed therapists who each provide free, weekly, one-to-one therapy to a single foster client, "for as long as it takes."

A small group of psychotherapists founded the organization as the Children’s Psychotherapy Project in San Francisco in 1994 with a mission to heal the wounds of complex trauma and ambiguous loss for current and former foster youth by providing individual, open-ended, relationship-based psychotherapy free of charge through a local network of volunteer clinicians. Incorporating as the non-profit A Home Within in 2001, the organization has grown to its current network of 21 chapters of volunteer clinicians across 12 states, serving nearly 350 clients who’ve experienced foster care.

Our vision is that all children who experience foster care are provided this essential support, ensuring that as they transition from foster care, regardless of which stage of life they are in, they have the inner tools they need to thrive. By matching clients with experienced therapists, we address the trauma and disruption inherent to foster care, help youth manage stress and anxiety, and develop the inner tools they need to become healthy adults.

Journey House is a non-profit based in Pasadena, CA that provides resources to folks impacted by the child welfare system. We work with former foster youth and we have no age limit attached to our services, because we understand that experiencing foster care has lifelong implications. Journey House's Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) program was established in 2022 by community members that have experienced the foster care system, with all of our program staff being former foster youth. VAPA's goal is to help the creative ideas and professional art practices of former foster youth come to life!

In this project you will see different terms that are used interchangeably by our community members to describe their identities and experiences. This confusing and complex set of terms is a reflection of the large scale issues that immediately complicate any set of work that takes place around our community. Here, we try our best to define them:

The Child Welfare System is the umbrella term that captures the entire set of state social programs, institutions, and actors that seek to provide services to children and families. The Foster Care System is an aspect of the child welfare system, which describes the process of removing a child from a family and placing them inside a temporary, or long term placement. One of the most common placements is known as a Foster Home that is run by Foster Parents, who are strangers to the Foster Child. Social workers have the discretion to choose the type of placement a child enters, with Kinship Care as their primary goal. Kinship Care is when a removed child is placed inside the home of an extended family member (Aunt, Uncle, Grandparents, Older Siblings, etc.). The third most common placement is a Group Home, or facility style placement, which is an institution run by a staff that watches over a group of youth. Our project approaches all three of these placement types as having experienced the child welfare system. At the age of 18, and in some cases at the age of 21, folks Age Out of the child welfare system, which describes the process of no longer being eligible for state services. This particular age group, folks who are 18+ and have experienced the child welfare system are grouped under different and conflicting terms: Former Foster Youth, Transition Age Youth, AB-12 Youth, and at times, still labeled Foster Youth.

This summary wants to make room for the different lived experiences of community members that aren't captured by terms such as Foster Youth, or Former Foster Youth: Unaccompanied Youth, International Adoptees, Adopted Youth, Orphans, Runaway Youth, and others. Folks that have experienced these systems should not be required to compress complexity and conflict into a single term that will fall short. Our community identities are constantly undergoing shifts and with more spaces built by community members to have these conversations, we will move closer to a foundation that helps us define ourselves.

Our Framework

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana Feminist Scholar and Theorist

"Imagination opens the road to both personal and societal change—transformation of self, community, culture, society. Without imagination, transformation would not be possible."- Gloria Anzaldúa

Our approach is from an angle of questioning that works towards uncovering alternatives. At the surface, we see large societal investments in art healing language and institutions adopting a framework that approaches art healing as revolutionary. Our work here is to not discredit art healing, but instead build a conversation that allows for former foster youth to share their experience and knowledge on this topic. The work of historically marginalized identities is categorized as working from marginalization, however, in this project, our community members speak from spaces of resistance.

The scholarship of Gloria Anzaldúa points to the particular set of challenges impacting the foster youth identity as the community approaches their journeys of healing and art practice. Vulnerability, training, access, knowledge, and time are privileges required by community members to enter the "traditional" art therapy space. Resistance comes from finding our own ways to our answers and here we witness four approaches.

“As a people who have been stripped of their history, language, identity, and pride, we attempt again and again to find what we have lost---by digging into our cultural roots imaginatively and making art from our findings.” - Gloria Anzaldúa

In the stories of our four artists, you will learn of the individual approaches taken to practice their form of art healing. The term resiliency only begins to scratch yet another surface, our community members have constructed their own. They don't see a pen, a spray can, or paper as others do--they see a language in their gestures, colors, and self-constructions. The ability to work simultaneously through one's past, present, and future highlights the immense power of art healing. No artist, in this project, ever described their process as easy, or comfortable. Their ability to speak publicly of their approach to themselves through art practice, highlights the strength of our artists.

Each of our participating community members were chosen for their extensive knowledge in their specific practice, lived experience, and their personal immeasurable uniqueness.

THALIA BERNAL

Thalia Bernal writes at work. On her days off she writes. In between on and off, she writes. Inside of writer rooms, studios, on Zoom calls, coffee shops, in bed, while driving. She is a true writer. We met up with Thalia at one of her favorite local coffee spots and had a great conversation. Her ability to bring a texture to her writing allows for readers to step into her shoes--a butterfly passing over brings a new tangent, a memory she wants to embrace then and there. The fencing that surrounds the shop is the same pattern she's placed on her nails, another memory of what makes Thalia a true writer.

JOEL SWAZO

Joel Swazo is a graphic designer from Los Angeles that calls his black Air Forces rain boots. We met up with Joel on his campus and learned more about his approach to design as an artist who holds multiple identities. Graphic Design can be a very lonely art process that requires its artists to think deeply of: accessibility, practicality, aesthetics, message construction--a lonely process that produces work that is seen and used by many. At the end of our conversation, through a lens of practicality, we had a better idea of why we all need black Air Forces as rain boots.

JESSIE CASTILLO

Jessie Castillo is an abstract painter from Ontario, California. His preferred tool is a set of spray paint cans. His canvases have consisted of: trains, city buses, freeway underpasses, trailers, kitchen walls, stretched canvases, paper, shoes, shirts, hand bags, and many others. Jessie has figured out who he is and his work is him. He invited us to his studio, where his creations hang on every wall, his rabbits watch him work, and his daughter builds her language through paint alongside him. Jessie is a generational talent who has invested a great amount of time in figuring out what it means to be an abstract painter.

Robert prattI garcia

Robert is a poet. A rapper. A Lincoln Heights historian who unearths the past of his city through his re-remembering's. His cultural background has given him the space to work through his past with a sincere connection to the earth. Robert is unafraid to ask questions, to go further down the rabbit hole, to get to his answers. In this interview you'll learn how Robert has continued to find himself and his family tree at the center of Los Angeles history. His writing and music show us all the true process of healing and creativity, one that is not so clean. Robert's authenticity and comfort with his answers is what makes him a timeless poet.

Karla Mancero

Karla is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a Master of Arts in Couples and Family Therapy from Antioch University Seattle. Karla came to A Home Within in 2021 seeking community and eager to donate her time to a pro bono foster client as a volunteer clinician. During our interview, we got to know Karla as an artist herself, whose Professional Certificate in Expressive Arts Therapy is clearly well-earned: she uses poetry, hand drumming, dancing, paint pouring, improv, and writing, both on her own and with her clients. It was a pleasure to hear Karla’s perspective on the intersections of her clinical practice and her own forms of creative expression, leading to a rich discussion of how the arts provide an avenue for trauma to be externalized through an embodied experience. To say the least, we’re extremely grateful Karla found A Home Within! We went ahead and took Karla's answers and crafted them in a way that captures her experiences and ties them to her importance and impact at A Home Within.

Please use the links below to learn more about the partnering organizations that worked together to build this project!

Credits:

A giant thank you to Mia and Chrissy from A Home Within for pushing this project forward! A huge Thank You to Thalia for editing and coordinating! Photography Credits: Michael Papias with special help from Eduardo Martinez. Thank you The East LA Film Shop for film processing and scanning!

NextPrevious