School Crisis Recovery and Renewal

Supporting students, educators, school staff, and school-based clinicians to effectively implement trauma-informed crisis recovery and renewal strategies.

This event has passed and registration is closed

Winter Institute on January 7, 2021

Register to attend the Summer Institute on June 3, 2021

Thank you to the almost 300 educators who joined us in January 2021 for our Winter Institute, Mending Our Wounds: Recovering from School Crisis through Art & Ritual.

Institute Goals

  1. Create a safe, generative, and regulating experience for educators, school-based mental health providers, and people who tend to the emotional wellbeing of youth.
  2. Engage participants in evidence based, art centered, ritual activities that positively impact the process of recovery and renewal after a crisis.
  3. Support participants in imagining new ways to incorporate ritual and art into their personal practice and larger learning communities when recovering from crisis.
  4. Facilitate an opportunity for school professionals to build community with one another through the sharing of wisdom and lived experience related to recovery and renewal.

Who Is This For?

School based professionals including instructors, administrators, community-based organizations/school partners, caregivers, and you!

Hotline Crisis Information
National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255
NAMI: 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or info@nami.org
Mental Health America: 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text MHA to 741741
SAMHSA’s National Helpline: referral and information – 1-800-662-HELP (4357)
SAMHSA’s Disaster Distress Helpline: 1-800-985-5990 or text TalkWithUs to 66746

Workshops

Participants select one workshop on the following recovery practices:

My Body is a Vessel: Self Care and Restoration 
Recovery and Renewal Practice: Movement and Embodiment 

Our physical bodies carry us through all the events of our life. The physical body absorbs every moment, and remembers all that occurs, even when the thinking mind attempts to forget. This workshop will give experiential time to practice some restoration and grounding practices to support and thank our bodies, as well as support participants in creating self-care plans. This session explores how crisis impacts participants, how they can take care of their bodies in the middle and after a crisis, and how to create a lifestyle that supports them through crisis.

Facilitator: Shirley Johnson, LMFT, MA 

Shirley is a licensed psychotherapist, energy healer, and yoga teacher based in Oakland, California. Passionate about self care and connecting to intuition as a form of political resistance and spiritual practice, Shirley leads a number of workshops supporting people to trust their inner wisdom and align with their inner healer.  

Shirley brings 10 years of yoga teaching experience and certifications in Vinyasa, Prenatal, and Kundalini Yoga. She holds a Master’s in Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and works with individuals and couples in her private practice. She has been studying various energy healing technologies the last 15 years, and brings explorations of codependency recovery, depression, sexuality, and race into her work. She has taught in seven different yoga teacher trainings and enjoys interweaving psychology and yoga.

She has taught in various settings and to different communities, including toddlers, teens, families, adults, and mature age folks. She truly believes if you have a body and can breathe, then this practice is for you! Shirley loves to support practitioners with developing a strong nervous system and a resiliency to be their authentic selves in this world. For more info, you can visit her website at: www.soulisticwellness.com

We are the Whole Story: Collective Healing and Storytelling Beyond Trauma 
Recovery and Renewal Practice: Storytelling and Coherent Narrative Construction 

Narratives are created by a constellation of stories. As stewards of collective health, it’s so important to identify strategic stories of healing: stories we know need to be told that share a common narrative about the urgency of rest, repair, and collective radiance during these improbable times, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and POC leaders and communities.

This narrative session introduced leaders to a framework for cultural strategy and engages in fun personal storytelling activities. In this space, we honor that each of us arrives to this moment with complex histories, cultures, and identities. And although we are not representatives for all who share those identities, there are lines of memory and experience that bind us. We explored those connections, and asked these powerful questions: What strength is there in connecting our stories? What do I need to move beyond trauma? How do we use culture and storytelling to name our suffering, while also inspiring narratives of hope and healing?

Facilitator: Michelle Mush Lee, M.A. Education, Equity & Social Justice

Mush is a writer, cultural strategist, and CEO of Whole Story Group, LLC, a narrative-based professional learning team founded on the principles of cultural equity, transformative leadership, and wholeness. Mush’s writings and talks have been featured on HBO, PBS, AfroPop, Summit Series, Social Venture Network, National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) and the Berkeley Communications Conference. A Harvard University, Project Zero Fellow, Mush is frequently a featured speaker on contemporary culture, racial justice and women of color in leadership. Her writing is published in All the Women in My Family Sing, an anthology of essays by women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Mush serves as a Cultural Affairs Commissioner for the City of Oakland, CA.

What Color is Your Heart Today? An Intentional Practice of Checking In
Recovery and Renewal Practice: Art-based Therapeutics

This workshop invited participants to connect with current-moment feeling state through drawing, painting, and/or building. A simple question, “What Color is Your Heart Today?”, guided the exploration and expression of the present state of mind. After processing the hands-on art experiential together, educators viewed hearts made by children across the developmental spectrum and asked questions about implementing this accessible art process in the classroom. 

Francine explained the scientific, and personal, rationale for offering this meditation.  She has implemented it for 11 years in her psychotherapy practice called PAINT (Psychotherapeutic Art Interventions for Navigating Trauma). PAINT, with Lincoln, is the recipient of an ACEs Aware Grant from the Office of the California Surgeon General and the Department of Health Care Services. PAINT is currently offered in more than 10 schools from pre-K through high school, including counseling-enriched classrooms.

Facilitator: Francine Ostream, Ph.D., LMFT

Clinician, teacher, trainer, and supervisor, Francine Ostrem devotes her mental health practice to children and families impacted by trauma and chronic stressors, including autoimmune conditions, Type 1 Diabetes in particular. Ostrem, Ph.D., LMFT, Expressive Arts Therapy Specialization, works at Lincoln, a mental health non-profit in West Oakland, and as part of a research and clinical team at the Madison Clinic for Pediatric Diabetes at UCSF. 

She is also in private practice in Berkeley. Ostrem is the developer of Psychotherapeutic Art Interventions for Navigating Trauma, PAINT, a school-based mental health initiative that seeks to reduce the negative impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences through the science of relationship and expression. This trauma protocol has been fully translated to telehealth.

Thriving > Surviving: Cultivating Accountable and Restorative Relationships
Recovery and Renewal Practice: Talking Circles (Restorative-Practices)

The Community Circle or Council concept is often associated with restorative justice. In schools, it can be tricky to truly embody what it means to be “restorative,” defaulting to punitive or “un-restorative” techniques to address harm/conflict, especially under all the pressures educators navigate and carry even as we facilitate a Circle with our students.  A Community Circle is a designated space and time that is distinguishable from “school-business as usual,” engaging students in an intentional process and ritual of building collective accountability and trust.

Tanya facilitated activities to engage participants in a dialogue about how we can begin the (restorative) practice of cultivating culture through Circle practice, communicating our needs and embodying the values necessary for collective accountability and wellness.  Moving beyond survival means that we can share ways to remind ourselves to stay curious and deepen our relationships while holding and facilitating a mutual space for accountability, discovery, possibility, and transformation.

Facilitator: Tanya Suzuki, (she/hers), MS, PPS

Tanya has been working in schools for over 21 years and currently provides support for educators, youth and schools as a Restorative (Justice) Practices educator/consultant, counselor, coach, and trainer/facilitator.  She also works with private clients in her coaching practice.  Her early experience as a budding clinician and school counselor deepened her scope of the imperative dynamics of relationship-building with youth, and the mutual/intergenerational development of resilience, hope, resourcefulness, and body wisdom.  

Tanya’s praxis incorporates the practices of non-violent communication, conflict resolution, coaching techniques/tools, embodiment practices, and mindfulness with a distinct social justice framework, informed by her organizing work in the Los Angeles chapter of the People’s Education Movement.  With this critical lens in her work with educators, Tanya is committed to moving beyond survival and re-imagining what it would look like to collectively cultivate a culture that embodies wellness, (restorative) justice, and wholeness in the face of institutional harms.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful that more than 200 people attended the School Crisis Recovery and Renewal (SCRR) Strategies for Mending Our Wounds: Recovering from School Crisis through Art and Ritual event on January 7, 2021. This half-day virtual institute for educators centered on sharing and learning recovery and renewal best practices after a crisis event through art and rituals. Each workshop featured community led and evidence-based strategies that promote individual and community healing in the classroom and beyond.

Thank you to the following partners and changemakers for generously sharing their wisdom and teachings with educators on January 7, 2021:

Resources

EVENT MATERIALS

Closing

After our breakouts, we came back together to share our learnings, explored how we might apply our experience to our work, and resourced one another to cultivate school crisis recovery skills, knowledge, and approaches.

We look forward to learning with you on June 3, 2021!