Our social justice mission is to bring mind-body healing through the expressive arts to any community in need, with a focus on women and children. We generate change within communities from the inside-out and the ground up. WE BELIEVE HAPPINESS is a birthright and a human right and the expressive arts are the sparks that lights the wildfire of powerful, positive and peaceful change in individuals, communities and the world. We serve anyone who is oppressed due to mental, physical, economic, ethnic, cultural, gender, or religious reasons.
We are supporting the migrant community at the border of California and Mexico, serving hundreds of women, children, and families via expressive arts and movement.
From 2016 to present, a small HAPPI team collaborates with multiple NGOs other to provide mental health services in the form of culturally sensitive, trauma-informed expressive arts therapy activities and yoga to over 100 children and families in a predominantly Syrian refugee camp near Idomeni, Greece, in Lesvos and in Athens.
Our team works with multiple organizations in Northern Thailand. We work with about 50-100 or more children and women over 10-14 days, engaging them in trauma-informed yoga and movement and expressive arts activities while also providing trauma-informed professional trainings for staff of the organizations in order to offer sustainable support to the communities.
Our training and fieldwork consists of mindfulness and yoga as well as didactic training in trauma-informed expressive arts, neurobiological research about trauma and other clinical and social justice aspects. Participants practice and offer trauma-informed expressive arts group facilitation with the local communities. This training program is open to psychotherapy interns, counselors, psychology students, social service providers or other youth/women educators or artists who want to gain experiences and be of service and enjoy cultural exchange with communities abroad in a hybrid internship/fieldwork/retreat setting.
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