Mosaic Hope Boxes at Kate's Club
This month, Paint Love had the pleasure of returning to Kate’s Club for two incredible events built around the idea “I’m worth it.” These two events marked our fourth and fifth projects with Kate’s Club. If you are unfamiliar their organization, they are an Atlanta-based nonprofit that empowers children and teens who have lost a parent or sibling. You can learn more about the work they do here.
Each month Kate’s Club has one to two Clubhouse days, specifically designed to provide services/tools to support and empower grieving children and their families. We are honored to have been involved in so many art projects during their Clubhouse days and this recent one left us equally enthralled in the incredible work of Kate’s Club and their staff members
Paint Love artist and Licensed Master Social Worker, Hannah Kimbrough, was the perfect match for this project. As an Atlanta area therapist, artistic enthusiast and incredible refurbisher, Hannah often utilizes creative expressive techniques with her clients. The theme of this month’s Clubhouse days was “I’m worth it” with an aim at helping students develop adaptive, general coping, and life skills.
Hannah came up with the idea of creating a Mosaic Hope Box. She wanted to help the students process through negative self-talk and develop alternative positive statements to remind the students of their self-worth and self-care skills.
Hannah prompted the students to come up with some of the negative self-talk statements they may say to themselves on a rough day. The students shared their “stinkin’ thinkin’, as Hannah wrote each of their negative words and statements on a stained glass tile. Then came everyone’s favorite part! The students got to put on safety goggles, grab a mallet, and break the tile.
Students then took the broken tiles, as well as other small tile pieces and created something beautiful from their negative broken words. They created “Hope Boxes.” To combat the negative thoughts, each student wrote positive statements about themselves to stick in the box. The students also wrote positive statements about other students in the group. In addition to the positive words, Hannah gave a Self-Care Handout, which she created (adapted from Linda Cunningham’s Tag Teen Grief Inc.) for each of the students to take home and keep in their box! The results of the this project were beautiful! Take a look!
We want to thank Hannah for her amazing work on this project and give a big thank you to Kate’s Club for continually inviting us to be a part of the work they are doing in the lives of youth in Atlanta.
We have attached Hannah’s “How Can I Help Myself?” handout here if you are interested in taking a look and learning about some great self-care techniques.