The Count Down to Our One Year Birthday

In 11 days we will be celebrating our one year Birthday, and boy are we excited!!

To prepare for this celebration we will spend the days leading up to it sharing stories from each month, so let us begin by how this all began. 
This video you see started IT ALL. I (Alexis Decosimo) had spent the summer of 2014 in frequent tears of helplessness watching a country I loved fall into the trauma of Ebola. Then I saw this video!

One of the most devastating parts of watching the Ebola epidemic unfold was knowing that, due to the community fear of  contracting Ebola, children were being left to grieve with little emotional support. Everyone was afraid of everyone and children were being orphaned and left without support. 

 As an art therapist, I saw this video as a beautiful reminder that, with the proper support, children are extremely resilient and expressive arts is an effective way of supporting their healing and resiliency.

I immediately called my comrade from my time in Liberia, Jessi Hanson, and told her we needed to find a way to bring expressive arts therapy programming to Liberia. By simply supporting communities to sing, dance, and play, we could provide ways to build resiliency and hope. 

Within a few days Jessi had a plane ticket to Liberia, and I was building ideas towards what this might look like. 

Stay tuned as our story continues....