How can we teach prevention, healing skills, and self-advocacy to the next generation--including those who have suffered the deep wounds of trauma and abuse?
How can we guide young people toward becoming independent, self-confident adults?
How do we foster healing in adults who have experienced traumatic abuse and support them in breaking the cycle?
SafeArt, Inc., a non-profit healing arts organization, has been working to address these questions since 2000. Their proactive approach to healing celebrates the power of creative expression and focuses on prevention, healing, and the promotion of healthy relationships.
In A Curriculum of Courage: Making SafeArt, you will find multi-disciplinary explorations for use in the classroom, with groups, or with individuals, including:
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Activities that incorporate discussion and creative expression, do not require a background in the arts, and are simple and accessible--even if you as facilitator have no experience in the arts
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Targeted information on specific topics such as mindfulness, healthy relationships, supporting LGBT youth and becoming trauma-informed
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Strategies for empowering youth to become proactive bystanders
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Approaches to managing difficult topics and clashing viewpoints
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Tips on self-care and management of your own personal response to abuse and trauma
Tracy Penfield, founder of SafeArt, is your guide on this journey. Her empathetic and confident voice will help you craft your own "Curriculum of Courage," rooted in sound science and experience, so you can help your participants learn to laugh, share, and even sing the truths of their lives.
A Curriculum of Courage: Making SafeArt is an invaluable resource for educators, youth leaders, mentors, mental health practitioners, medical personnel, parents, and anyone who wishes to encourage healing and strength in our communities.
Tracy Penfield is an artist and performer who founded SafeArt after her own experiences healing from a destructive marriage and helping others to heal through creative expression. She lives and works in central Vermont. To learn more about her work, visit safeart.org.
Penfield, Tracy: - Tracy Penfield has been actively engaged in the performing and visual arts since 1975, and has taught extensively in both realms. A performing dancer and exhibiting fiber artist, she has also worked as a professional weaver and tailor. She has studied many therapeutic modalities, including Voice Movement Therapy and Healing Touch. Tracy was a part of a traumatic relationship from the age of fourteen to twenty-nine. Along the way, she discovered dance, and it became the empowering medium of her release and subsequent healing. SafeArt grew from her vision to harness the natural healing qualities of creative expression in a conscious and courageous curriculum. In tandem with the SafeArt methodologies laid out in this book, Tracy facilitates soma and psyche integration, empowering the innate interconnection between the body and the mind, both conscious and subconscious. Her Tracing Technique focuses on the creation and tracing of healthy patterns in movement and thought. Her specialty is releasing, processing, and managing trauma from any cause, whether it be abuse, accident, illness, loss, or any other. Tracy makes her home in central Vermont.
