Creating a Vision for the Future: December Healing Club

SURVIVORS celebrated the end of another year fostering a welcoming community for torture survivors by organizing a Healing Club for clients to spend time with one another and to create a vision board. Clients, their families, interpreters, volunteers, and staff joined together in an afternoon of crafting and making new friends.

Clients were invited to reflect on their accomplishments and challenges of 2017, then to visualize their goals and desires for the New Year by creating a vision board out of magazine clippings and construction paper. Clients shared their vision boards with the group once they were complete. One client realized her goals had already been achieved. She said, “I put a picture of this kitchen on my board. My goal for a long time has been to have a home with a kitchen. Now, I finally have a kitchen where I live and I can cook meals for my daughter and start to think about growing my family again.”

SURVIVORS’ Clinical Case Manager, Rachel Mahoney, who facilitated the group, noticed a common theme among the boards. Clients expressed that SURVIVORS gave them a sense of belonging to a community and that they wanted to spend more time with friends, family, and in a community in the New Year. “When you’re a clinician the interventions you facilitate affect you too,” Rachel said. “Even though we come from different backgrounds, cultures, and parts of the world we share universal desires like community and a connection to nature. It was wonderful to witness and connect with clients in that way.”