|
San Diego,
CA – 10/29/07
CHART(Communities Healing through Art) in conjunction with
the Loyola Marymount University Department of Marital and Family Therapy
(Clinical Art Therapy) has joined with Save the Children to provide art
therapy programming for children and families who are victims of the recent
wildfires in Southern California.
The multiple fires that
raged last week from Malibu to Lake Arrowhead to San Diego and the Mexican
border in the south burned more than 500,000 acres, destroyed over 2000
homes and forced an evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.
Soon after the fires began
spreading, CHART contacted Save the Children’s rapid response team, which
had already deployed safe space kits to Red Cross shelters and was reaching
out to other affected communities in San Diego County. Shortly afterwards,
Dr. Debra Linesch, Department Chair at LMU was recruited and, along with her
colleague, Dr. Paige Asawa, they immediately began contacting art therapists
in the greater San Diego area to organize volunteer teams to carry out art
therapy programming with the shelter-bound population of families and
children.
By week’s end, a half-dozen
licensed art therapists had responded and begun working in the SafeSpaces
areas set up by Save the Children staffers in the evacuee shelters. With
more art therapists calling in to volunteer, and with FEMA planning to set
up a series of Disaster Recovery Centers across the region, Save the
Children asked CHART to plan for a larger program of extended duration.
Art therapy offers a well
established set of methods to assist in psychosocial integration and
recovery and has proven particularly effective in work with children who
have experienced natural or man-caused crises. Children are offered art
materials and a safe, structured venue to process their experiences and to
engage in a variety of art and creative experiences. Families have a place
to gather and enjoy creative activities with their children, reinforce
family connections and communication, or just have a chance to relax and
talk about their lives. The therapists will closely monitor each child in
their assigned group and ensure that parents and associated caregivers are
informed if special risks, e.g. for post-traumatic stress, are observed.
About the Loyola Marymount
University Department of Marital and Family Therapy (Clinical Art Therapy):
The LMU program is housed
in the College of Communication and Fine Arts. The Department provides
a full-time two year education that combines rigorous academic course work
with two clinical traineeships. A modified three-year program allows
students to fulfill program requirements at a slower pace but still requires
daytime class attendance. The LMU program is strengthened by a
distinguished faculty who are clinicians as well as prolific contributors to
scholarship in the field. (For more info: http://www.lmu.edu)
About CHART:
CHART is an organization
that applies the healing power of creative arts activities along with the
clinical resources of art therapy in promoting psychosocial rehabilitation
to populations in distress. CHART began in January, 2005, organizing teams
of artists and art therapists to travel to Southeast Asia to assist in
tsunami relief. Today, CHART continues to expand its activities which
currently include work with the Boys & Girls Club in the Gulf Coast in
Katrina relief, a collaborative community-based rehabilitation program in
India's tsunami-ravaged Andaman & Nicobar Islands, organizing art therapy
workshops with Indian universities and helping to organize the 2008
Southeast Asia Art Therapy Conference.
About Save the
Children:
Save the Children is the
leading independent organization creating lasting change for children in
need in more than 50 countries around the world, including the United
States. For 75 years, Save the Children has been helping children survive
and thrive by improving their health, education and economic opportunities
and, in times of acute crisis, mobilizing rapid lifesaving assistance to
help children recover from the effects of war, conflict and natural
disasters. For more information, visit savethechildren.org.
|
