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Dear Friends of Creative Alternatives:
This summer Creative Alternatives is initiating two new partnerships to provide drama therapy groups for child survivors of war and for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Creative Alternatives drama therapy programs can help these children and veterans use creativity to regain a sense of personal connection and re build life skills that have been damaged by their war experiences. We are asking for your help to fund these programs. Please make an online donation to support these programs or send your donation by mail.
We will be partnering with:
1. The International Rescue Committee Youth Program which provides programming aimed at supporting successful transition and resilience for refugee children recently relocated to the U.S. from war torn countries. The CANY program will be primarily with Iraqi children, Burmese children and children from West African nations.
2. Home Again: Veterans & Families Readjustment and Reintegration Initiative of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services which provides mental health services to veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and to their families to support successful transition and re-adjustment. CANY will provide drama therapy services starting this summer to the children of returning veterans as well as to veterans seeking mental health services.
Engaging and developing the vitality and skills of youth is critical to rebuilding communities and promoting peace. For child refugees seeking safety and new lives in New York and for our young veterans seeking to re-build their lives and restore relationships with loved ones after the trauma of war, creative expression can serve as a powerful form of healing and re-connection.
Today, some 30 armed conflicts rage around the world. The impact of these wars is most profound on the children who endure and survive and on the young men and women who fight and also endure and survive.
We in the U.S. are fortunate that our children do not live in war, but our young men and women who fight are returning profoundly impacted by war. Of the approximately 300,000 veterans from Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom who have accessed care through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 40 percent are reporting mental health concerns. In a recent CBS News report, the head of Veterans Affairs stated that there are 1,000 suicide attempts per month in the VA Medical facilities.
Please help support these two important new programs with your donation.
Thank you!
Jonathan Hilton
Executive Director
Veria Television Films CANY Youth Program
This past week Veria Television filmed a CANY group at Hope Leadership Academy, one of our programs in partnership with the Children's Aid Society. Veria T.V. is a channel on the DISH Network that produces many original shows on healthy living www.veria.com. They wanted to do a piece on us for their show The Art of Living Gallery. The half-hour show explores the ways in which creativity fosters healthy and happy lives. The Art of Living Gallery explores the visually compelling and fascinating healing effects stimulated by the creative process of the arts. Through inspiring accounts the stories shown on the show reveal the amazing effect that artistic expression has upon the physical, mental and emotional well-being of people coping with a wide range of health conditions.
This past week we were given the opportunity to film a group that was led with some of the youth from Hope leadership Academy, an ongoing CANY drama therapy program with at risk youth in Harlem in partnership with the Children's Aid Society. In addition to filming the group, Lucy McLellan, CANY Program Director and Heidi Landis, CANY Program Manager and Hope Academy program leader, were interviewed along with Danny Morris, the Hope Academy Director and two of the teens in the drama group. We will certainly keep you informed as to when our segment will be aired.
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POETRY PRESENTATION AT THE CHILDREN'S CENTER OF HAMDEN
By Emily Nash, LCAT
CANY Artistic Director
Poetry, as a way speaking the unspeakable, has become a growing part of the culture of Trowbridge cottage, a residential cottage for girls at the Children's Center of Hamden. Every Monday, several of the teenage girls who reside in this cottage join together with CANY group leaders ( Emily Nash, John Rainer, Dan Sarnelli and Annie DiMartino) in a group in which for the past year, drama has taken a backseat to poetry as a means of deep self-exploration and expression. Each Monday, girls rush into the meeting room, notebooks in hand, eager to read the "new poems" they have written during the week in between sessions. For girls who have been painfully shy, resistant to more spontaneous interactive work, cut off from the group experience as they sit frozen in angry postures, poetry has become a path to their inner worlds and a means of reconnecting with others. Girls who have been scapgoated and isolated, have attracted attention and high praise, as they touch others through daring to voice unbearable pain, loss, heatbreak, and their determination to overcome.
On Monday, May 12th, the girls of Trowbridge Cottage performed the third presentation of their poetry to the larger community of staff and fellow residents of the Children's Center. Brave, proud, stepping up to the microphone, voices that had once been silenced could be heard in every corner of the large dining hall. Making full use of the stage on one end of the room, some of the girls chose to have their poems simultaneously enacted by group members and CANY staff. The presentation was a wild success, met with great applause from an appreciative audience. The moment after they took their final bow, one of the girls, a gifted poet who dared to read for the first time, remarked, "we have to do another one of these right away. And read all the poems we've ever written. OK?" OK!
MIRACLES
Miracles are things that create the
everyday things.
Miracles are when something good happens
To you or someone else.
A miracle that happened to me is the
Fact that I was born!
A miracle is when you point out
Small things in everyday life that
Bring the best in the day!
Another miracle is the fact that you
Have so many things to be grateful for.
Miracles are important in everyday life.
It proves not everything has to go wrong. by: SA , Age 15
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CANY PRESENTS AT TWO CONFERENCES
New York University Conference Presentation
Program Director Lucy McLellen and senior workshop facilitator John Rainer presented a CANY Workshop titled The Therapeutic Use of Shakespeare at an International Conference at New York University on April 25th, as part of NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. It was an excellent opportunity to share the work we do with delegates from Europe, Asia, Russia and Jamaica. The response and interest in the CANY workshop was excellent. It provided Lucy and John with a wonderful opportunity to share our work and philosophy and also learn some new techniques of how we can use Shakespeare in our drama therapy programs. John has included much work with Shakespeare in the CANY groups he leads at St. Mary's Center, with individuals diagnosed with AIDS, Mount Sinai Hospital inpatient psychiatric units with adults, children and adolescents and at Children's Village with psychiatrically disabled children. This conference was truly an international exchange of energies, philosophies and insights. We use a wide range of theater arts to inspire our CANY drama therapy work, but this conference reaffirmed that using Shakespeare can illuminate and guide us as we continue to heal through creative expression.
Westchester Group Psychotherapy Society Presentation
CANY Artistic Director, Emily Nash, LCAT presented recently at the Westchester Group Psychotherapy Society on The Use of Therapeutic Communities with Children and Adolescents in Residential Treatment. As one participant wrote after the workshop: "An interactive workshop was just what our membership had been wanting to have. So often therapists forget that they need to play. I have gotten some good ideas for the work that I do with kids from the workshop. In addition to your interesting drama therapy exercise, you provided us with answers to our conceptual questions."
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NY Open Center Gallery Exhibit to benefit CANY
The Motion of Life Photography of Christina deRoos www.christinaderoos.com
Opening Sat., June 14th 7:30 - 9:30
Location: The Open Center 83 Spring Center (east of Broadway) www.opencenter.org
212-219-2527 By appt.
Exhibit Runs June 14th-July 31st. 25% of sales will be donated to Creative Alternatives to support our new programs with veterans and child refugees.
Christina deRoos presents her experience of the motion of life during a transition from living in NYC to living in a fishing village on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Reflected in the series are a wide range of emotions, from excitement to fear, disappointment to contentment, confusion to calm.
We wish to express our immense gratitude to Christina for her generosity and her ongoing support for CANY!
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Thank you for reading our newsletter.
We encourage you to forward this newsletter
to others who may also be interested in
CANY's work with traumatized children
and adults.
CANY brings hope and healing to individuals
impacted by a wide variety of circumstances,
including abused and/or neglected children,
homeless families, domestic violence survivors,
individuals living with HIV / AIDS, and
more.
We welcome you to contact us for more
information or to arrange a visit to observe
a CANY group.
Thank you for your support!
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Thanks to Our Funders
We wish to thank the following foundations
for their support this fiscal year.
The Tow Foundation
The Disabled American Veterans Charitable
Trust
The Marion E. Kenworthy-Sarah H. Swift
Foundation
The Heckscher Foundation for Children
The Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr. Foundation
The Albert and Bertram Linder Foundation
The Kealy Family Foundation
The Victor R. Wright Foundation
Roy J. Zuckerberg Family Foundation
The Blum Family Foundation
James Heller Charitable Unitrust
Daryl Roth Productions, LTD.
The Donald R. Mullen Family Foundation
The Philip D. & Tammy S. Murphy Foundation
The Swig Foundation
The Karen & Kevin Kennedy Foundation
The Reba Judith Sandler Foundation
The Boehm Family Foundation
Eric P. Sheinberg Foundation
Charina Foundation
The Malcolm Gibbs Foundation
The Janet Levy Charitable Trust
Also we thank our Board members
and the many generious individuals whose
support has helped us surpass our Annual
Appeal goal for this year.
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