| Create! Opportunity, a program of Buildabridge Community, uses arts-integrated education to teach life skills to people in shelters and transitional homes. The primary mission of Create! Opportunity is to provide basic life skills training to parents and families in shelters and transitional homes. While numerous organizations provide life skills training, Create! Opportunity is unique in its mission to integrate the arts as a teaching method. Through the transformative power of the arts, individuals can develop their awareness and ability to strengthen existing skills, in addition to acquiring new skills. Create! Opportunity builds bridges between professionals within communities to those in most need of life skills information and training.
BuildaBridge believes that parenting and family intervention through the creative arts will facilitate what research has always stated: develop the parent and you develop the child. A growing body of research (Foa & Kozak, 1986; Foa & Meadows, 1997; Gaensbauer, 1994; Galante & Foa, 1986; Garmezy & Rutter, 1985; Lyons, 1987; March, Amaya-Jackson, Murray, & Schulte, 1998) supports the arts as an effective means for positive and productive life skills development and generating effective coping skills through therapeutic practices.
With Create! Opportunity, Buildabridge hopes to deliver an effective arts-based life skills curriculum for youth and families that includes social skills, parenting skills, job skills, financial management, stress management, conflict resolution, skills for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and integrated spiritual development.
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Who Create! Opportunity serves |
Here in Philadelphia
Create! Opportunity is provided for the unemployed and underemployed
residents of the greater Philadelphia area, specifically in low-income
neighborhoods, transitional homes and shelters, who lack the resources
and current information needed to help them gain or improve employment
to improve their standard of living. Primary recipients are individuals
in transitional shelters or homes where Create! Opportunity is
implemented. We hope to eventually expand the target audience of
Create! Opportunity to reach other community centers and school
programs.
On a more global level
BuildaBridge's constituent audience is the most vulnerable 20% of the
US and world's population who suffer in poverty, physical pain and
emotional suffering as a result of war, catastrophic circumstances,
human trafficking, abuse and neglect. Like all other people, those in
such difficult positions also desire to live with hope and joy, strong
connections to family and social structures, with meaningful employment
and with a vision for their future and the future of their children.
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Why we provide Create! Opportunity |
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Background Research
A growing body of research confirms the importance of the arts in improving learning and academic performance, raising self-esteem, encouraging self-discipline and social skills development, building community, fostering economic development and community revitalization, decreasing youth involvement in crime and enhancing physical and emotional health, creativity and spiritual growth.
The withdrawal of life skills courses in our city's transitional system leaves many homeless families in our area with diminished access to skill training, empowerment and hope for a better future for themselves and their children. Research studying the familial structure of transient families supports the experiences of BuildaBridge volunteers. That is, the shelter systems do not meet significant personal and developmental needs, most often due to state and city budget cuts and insufficiently skilled or motivated staff. Consistent with the literature, we have observed that:
- Residents tend to stay longer than the city’s stated limit of four-months. Some stay as long as a year, and others have extended stays in multiple shelters.
- Residents are frequently overly argumentative with the administrative staff, their children and each other.
- Parents often raise their voices to their children and do not seem to encourage self-expression with their children or fellow residents.
- Parents habitually neglect their children's needs, leaving them in the care of older siblings, alone to participate in activities or alone to wander the shelter and the neighborhood surrounding the shelter. They also seem not to take active roles in their children's school activities.
- Residents are often seen physically dominating children by grabbing, pulling, pushing and making threatening gestures.
- Children are commonly late or absent to activities due to their parents' mismanagement of time and/or inability to read and understand activities calendars/instructions.
These behaviors are indicators of high stress and anxiety, poor parenting skills, a lack of social skills that limit employment opportunities and a need for a parent "time-out" for self-development. Mothers are typically young with incomplete education inadequate coping skills and inadequate parental role models.
At the same time, we have observed a number of assets on which to build an effective training and education program. At a recent Martin Luther King arts activity in a transitional home with young children and their parents, we developed and delivered a curriculum about dreams. We observed parents that want to dream with their children. They dream for meaningful jobs and want to love their kids. We also observed creative parents who enjoyed the creative arts activities as much as their young children.
A Request for Change
The directors of the transitional homes, social workers and resident women have requested assistance in learning, through creative ways, needed social skills, including financial management. BuildaBridge offered a pilot program in June 2004, a prototype of a new arts-based curriculum that teaches about financial management (the Money News Network), including budgeting and banking. The program demonstrated overwhelming success and was met with requests from women in transition for further arts-based training.
The goal of Create! Opportunity is to provide a program that is unique and innovative. In evaluation discussions with group home directors and transitional home staff, the constant complaint of residents is the "boring" nature of talk therapy in counseling and lecture approaches to skills training. A creative edutainment approach to life skills training will provide needed relief from harsh environments and daily life struggles.
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The next steps of Create! Opportunity are to connect content experts and work with community artists and shelter residents to develop the curriculum.
Once the seven modules of Create! Opportunity are written, we hope to find varying creative means of implementing them within shelters. Methods can include film and other multimedia, live dramatic presentations, game show formats, hands-on art projects, as well as many others. (An objective of Create! Opportunity is to make the modules as interactive and entertaining as possible while holding true to the educational content. Therefore we encourage multiple mediums of arts-integrated approaches within each module. Also to be included is a space and time for participants to practice using new terms and to receive feedback and consultation.) |
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