August 28, 2008, 1:38 pm

Seattle Woman Magazine highlighted Art with Heart Founder and Executive Director in September’s Art & Culture issue. Check it out! The magazine is free and found at over 400 locations in the greater Seattle area. Locations include cafés, specialty shops, grocery stores, salons, spas, medical offices, etc. The article highlights Founder Steffanie Lorig’s story about how she started Art with Heart and the books that have helped thousands of children around the world.

CarePages.com also highlighted Art with Heart in this month’s lead spotlight story about using art therapy to heal. Read the full story here! The article is entitled “Get creative! Hospitals, organizations and patients use ‘Art with Heart’ to encourage healing.” CarePages is an online community of millions of people coming together to share the challenges, hopes and triumphs of anyone facing a life-changing health event. This is the second time they have highlighted Art with Heart’s outreach to hospitalized and seriously ill children.

And finally, Step Inside Design and Communication Arts have both also mentioned Magnificent Marvelous Me in their September/October issues as a compelling pro-bono project that involved many well-known artists and is making a difference in the lives of children.

August 26, 2008, 4:21 pm

We always get excited to hear about how Art with Heart’s books are being used, but when we got Stacey’s email, we were particularly moved.

Agulhas Theatre Works in Johannesburg, South Africa, isn’t able to afford a book for each child, so Stacey used ‘Chill & Spill’ as a jumping off point for the children she serves. These children are learners with special educational needs (mentally or physically challenged eg: bilateral clubfoot, Downs Syndrome, etc).

She adapted one of the activities from the book that focused on body image and had each of the children create their own life-size puppets which allowed them NOT to be differentiated as able-bodied or disabled children, but united them all as artists and performers.

Working in pairs, the children traced their body outlines and painted puppets on cardboard, leaving ‘holes’ for their own faces. As the children held the puppets, a choreographer guided them in a dance that brought the puppets to life.

This special workshop allowed each child to unlock their inhibitions – each puppet embracing the unique characteristics of their imagination, allowing healing and empowerment. coumadin safety

Stacey ordered our books last year and wrote to us recently to let us know what she thought.

Wrote Stacey, “The Therapist’s Companion to Chill & Spill is a great, portable guide book. It’s a well-structured platform both theoretically and experientially for any expressive arts facilitator to use, no matter where in the world your creativity takes you. I have also enjoyed Steffanie’s long distance support and I loved working with these 60 brave children!’

It has been an absolute pleasure to see Stacey’s creativity and support help children in such a meaningful way.

She has made a request for 20 books to be sent for her next round of workshops…but doesn’t have the funding. A donation of $300 would cover the cost of the books as well as shipping to South Africa. If you would like to help, please donate today so we can get the books into her hands!

August 20, 2008, 8:10 am

We received letters this morning from two Child Life Specialists from Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston who both shared different stories about the difference that Chill & Spill made for their patients.

Hollie wrote to say that she ordered Chill & Spill because of the great referrals she had gotten from other Child Life Specialists and because she saw that her long-term patients really needed to be able to have a way to express their emotions and release them. She wrote that she likes the journals because they give her teen patients the ability to be able to do that privately and on their own time, but that the direct result of that is that it then helps them open up to others. She writes,

“I had a 14 year old patient who would not open up and communicate with either staff or even her mom. Once provided with Chill & Spill, this patient was able to appropriately express her emotions and immediately became more open with her mom, Child Life Specialists and nursing staff!”

Hollie’s co-worker, Shay, also wrote to tell us that all the patients that she gave the journal to were grateful to receive them and enjoyed filling them out. She writes about her 17 year old patient,

“Even though no one had told her, she knew she was dying. She filled the journal with day to day activities, visitors, pictures, magazine cut outs and even had staff sign it. She completely filled it up (and then some). She even [was inspired to] research dream interpretations. I think that, after the patient died, it was helpful to her mother. I know it was helpful for my patient.”

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August 14, 2008, 7:49 am

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Lisa, our wonderful Development Assistant, recently took a trip to Guatemala and brought copies of Oodles de Doodles (our Spanish version of Art with Heart’s therapeutic activity book for hospitalized children) for the children she’d be working with in the local cancer ward there. An art therapist named Dulce had been trying for over a year to get books to this hospital and was thrilled to welcome Lisa and the books to the ward.

Lisa was surprised to find out that because the children don’t go to school, none of them knew how to color or draw. Despite that, they took to it enthusiastically and were proud of their new skills inspired by Oodles de Doodles. The other fact that Lisa was surprised to find was that because the hospital had very little in the way of resources and rooms, children with cancer are given treatments in the waiting room and then sent home. Lisa will post more about her trip and how she saw the books making a difference in an upcoming blog entry.