How to Make Beautiful “Life Books” with System-involved Youth

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

This hands-on participatory workshop will allow participants to use creative materials and practice finding reframing language for developing a tool that tells the journey of a young person’s life. Material list will be sent out prior to class, but common office materials can be used as well.  Questions to be pondered will include: What parts of their story do they wish to tell? How can they take ownership and responsibility for their Lifebook? How can they use goal setting to imbue their Lifebook with purpose and empowerment?

Learning Objectives

Participants will:

· Learn how storytelling through crafting improves a youth’s sense of self and direction.

· Practice turning a system involved youth’s experiences, words and pictures into a usable and expandable emotionally supportive tool.

· Learn skills of identifying “reframing” language in relation to challenging life history experiences.

Agenda 

10:00am-10:30am Introduction of Trainer and participants to each other and sharing of personal and professional experience with both Life Books and system involved youth

10:30am-11:15pm Teaching: Exploring the history and use of LifeBooks in American foster/adoption circles and in multicultural systems around the world. We will review and share different styles of books and how they can be used to support a healthy evolving self-identity.

11:15am-12:00pm Group Shared Activity: Participants will begin the process of creating a Lifebook, by using a sample description of a system involved youth and a collection of photos and word art. We will then work together to create unique healthy reframing of their current stories and ways that youth can engage their truth in an emotionally safe way.

12:00 pm-12:30pm Lunch Break (CEUs will not be offered for this time)

12:30 pm-1:00pm Group Discussion: Once initial part of Lifebook is designed, the group will discuss useful prompts to utilize for the future pages of this youth’s personal story to support them as they evolve and grow.

1:00 pm-2:15pm Activity 2: Participants will then create an expandable Lifebook using whatever materials they are able to source, which should include, but is not limited to: an expandable binder, colored paper, sheet protectors, glue, scissors, magazines, colored pens, stickers etc.

2:15pm-2:45pm Sharing of our work, Appreciations, Work Integration, and final questions

2:45 pm-3:00pm Evaluations

Meet Our Trainer

“We can create together. We can heal together. We can mark the moments of ritual together. May the work of our hearts and hands speak together the truth of our lives.”

Shoshana has been working with communities and professional caregivers educating and training on the issues and challenges around progressive illness, trauma, death and bereavement for families for over 36 years. In that work she has supported people in many ways and forms as they experience illness, grief, healing, recovery, and transformation.

She began her grief and loss professional journey during the illness and death of both of her parents when she was a teenager. She subsequently served a residency in Berkeley to become an interfaith chaplain and now describes herself as “a Jewish chaplain, who works from an interfaith perspective”.

She has trained, counselled, and supported adults and children dealing with terminal illnesses, (and students/volunteers wanting to learn) using art modalities and non-traditional approaches

The thread that stitches together all the pieces of her work life is care, compassion and comfort for suffering people who find themselves outside the system of norms in American mainstream culture.

As a person who has lived outside those norms all her life, Mama Shoshana says with conviction, “We have our unconventional ways, and I am here to tell you that they are valid. There are many roads up this mountain called life, and we survive the unimaginable by stitching together all that we learn from one another.”

This course meets the qualifications for (4.5) BBS CEUs for LCSWs, LMFTs, LPCCs, and LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.