In Bloom: Sowing seeds of hope
We reflect on the start of 2022, cultivating hope, and exploring creative possibilities.
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Hello to our wonderful community,Â
Welcome to our February newsletterâthis is Flora, here to say congratulations on making it through January! The first month of a new year is often a tricky time for many of us; with seasonal celebrations over, expectations for the year set, and not much coming up in the calendar, another year of work and responsibility can often seem daunting and stressful. This feeling can loom over February too, as by now we might feel wrapped up once again with work, fed up with the cold weather (if youâre in the Northern hemisphere), and just not feeling 2022âŠ
But all is not lost! In todayâs newsletter, weâll be talking all about how to cultivate hopeâfor now, and the rest of the year. Weâll get started with a grounding exercise that will help you nourish the seed of hope, tell you all about why Chayn is feeling hopeful, and finally, think about how creativity can help hope bloom! You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Bloom newsletter.
Ground: Cultivating Hope
In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, researcher and storyteller BrenĂ© Brown tells us that âHope is not an emotion; it's a way of thinkingâ. But what does that actually mean? It means that hope is not just a way we feel when weâre happy about something that is going to happen, or something that might be possible, but that itâs a mindset that we need to get into to be hopeful. Todayâs grounding exercise will help us focus on how to adopt that mindset of hope and get us feeling more hopeful.
Spend a couple of minutes thinking about 5 things that you think have gone wrong, or that you think you might have done badly, in the past month. Make a note of them.
Now go back and try to reframe the âbadâ things into hopeful things. For example, âI made a terrible dinner for my friends on Tuesday, they must all think I am a bad cook and I am so embarrassedâ. This could be reframed as: âI made dinner for my friends, it didnât taste as good as I had hoped, but I will have more opportunities to cook for them again, and I hope to cook something tastier next time!âÂ
Now make a list of 5 things that you are hopeful for this month. Keep this list and look back at the end of the month and reflect on what happened that made you hopeful, and what you can be hopeful for in the future.
Root: Connecting with the Chayn communityÂ
We have been busy writing, editing and renewing our Bloom courses, ready for 2022! You will be able to sign up for courses next month (March), and they will launch in April. To be notified about sign up and launch dates, please head to our website, and/or sign up with your email address here.Â
We have also been working on lots of other projects at Chayn, here are some updates on whatâs been going on!
Recruitment: Weâre recruiting therapists to help us provide trauma-informed support to survivors of abuse and sexual violence! We are especially looking for therapists with proficiency in English, and one of the following languages: Spanish, Hindi, Urdu, French, and Portuguese. The deadline to apply is 28 March, and you can find full details here. We will have many positions opening up soon, including for translation and course facilitation in Hindi and French, so do keep an eye on our recruitment page for new job adverts!Â
Volunteer work: We have 8 new amazing volunteers who joined our team this month and together we have been working on:Â
Less than 2%: Our podcast exploring how the social structures meant to help survivors of assault instead fail them. Weâve been brainstorming the storytelling arc with our team and writing original scripts for the episodes. Recording starts soon, so watch this space for more.Â
Bloom: We are writing a new course on image-based abuse and have been working on getting feedback from the team on how to make the content more inclusive of everyoneâs experiences.Â
New guide alert: Last year we worked on creating a guide on reproductive rights and your options for abortion and we are hoping to launch it next month! We have also decided on a name for the guide: âItâs Your Choice: A Judgement-Free Guide To Your Options If Youâre Pregnantâ. Follow us on our socials for more updates!
We will start looking at applications for new volunteers for our new cycle, which starts in April, next month, so if you are interested in joining our team, please fill out the signup form here.Â
Branch: Creative HopeÂ
The virtual exhibition of Chayn's Creative Hope project is now live; if you haven't read about the project already in our blog post, learn all about it here!
âCreative expression can be one way for survivors to take back control of their lifeâs narrative, tap back into their strengths and skillsets, and create meaning from their life experiencesâ â Dana, on the National Domestic Violence Hotline website.
Creativity can be a healthy, beautiful way for us to express difficult feelings and engage with others. From running creative workshops with our communities to sharing our work on social media or in physical spaces, there are countless ways to share our creativity with those around us. But even though we all have the seeds of creativity within us, we donât all have the tools to help them grow. So, we wanted to run a series of workshops that gave survivors the skills to cultivate their creativity, and show them how they can use creative expression to explore their life stories. This process can be profoundly empowering; as Dana says in the quote above, it can give survivors back control and allow us to create meaning from our experiences.
Deciding what kind of workshops we wanted to host was difficult, as there are so many creative practices that could help survivors explore their experiences. We discussed sculpture, painting, ceramics and creative writing, but we decided that crafts that necessitated a studio, expensive equipment, and a substantial time commitment would not be the best use of our funding or participants' time. We also wanted to teach survivors skills they could continue to cultivate after finishing the workshops, so any equipment or location-dependent practices would have made this much harder, as they are less physically and financially accessible.
We chose poetry as the subject for one of the workshops because, as Audre Lorde once said: âFor women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity for our existence. It forms the quality of light from which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.â This description struck a chord with us as it expresses the agency that writing poetry can give; we can take our hopes, dreams and memories and turn them into language that can inspire changeâin the poet and the reader. Alyson Kissner, the first team lead of Creative Hope and doctoral candidate in poetry, originally had applied for funding for the project with the idea of running poetry workshops, and I too am a practising poet.
We chose photography for the second workshop, as image-making is quickly becoming part of our everyday lives via our phones and other personal devices, so itâs an accessible skillâmany people have a phone camera or access to a camera. Itâs also a wonderful way to capture the world as we see it; the way a person takes a photo is very personal: what have they photographed? What angle did they take it from? Where is it? As the old adage goes: âa picture is worth a thousand wordsâ.
Facilitated by author, poet, and performer Amani Saeed, the poetry workshop was made up of two sessions, which involved experimentation with different forms of writing, responses to pieces of art, as well as lots of group reflection on the participantsâ work and common themes that arose throughout the sessions.
Facilitated by award-winning photographer Sophie Green, the photography workshop was made up of three sessions. These sessions covered an introduction to the world of creative photography, a digital camera training session, taking photos for a brief (Sophie asked the participants to imagine they had been asked by a magazine to document the community in the area of London where the workshop took place), how to use disposable film cameras, and how to find themes in our own work.
Overall, for both poetry and photography, the participants all said that taking part in the workshops was a wonderful experience, one that they wished could have lasted longer, and that they were grateful to have taken part in. The facilitators echoed these sentiments, saying that they thoroughly enjoyed facilitating the workshops and that they were glad Chayn had created spaces for survivors to engage with creative practice.Â
In December 2021, we launched an open call for poems and photographs by survivors for a global virtual exhibition. We are thrilled to share that the exhibition, which features work from more than 20 survivors from around the world, is now live! Go and have a virtual browse of their beautiful artworks here.
If youâd like to read more about what happened at the workshops, check out this blog.Â
Have a hopeful rest of the month (and year!) and keep nourishing your aspirations, desires, and creative thoughts. Iâll leave you with a wonderful quote from novelist Barbara Kingsolver:Â
âThe very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.â
For anything urgent, you can always reach us at team@chayn.co. Weâll see you very soon.
With love,Â
Flora & the Bloom Team