Mini Grant Triad Impacts: --

Mini Grant SenseMaker Project Story or Micro-Narrative

  • Grant Project:
  • Description:
  • Role:
  • Date submitted:

How This Person Interpreted Their Story or Micro-Narrative

Note: Responses which fell closer to the middle (between two or three options) are shown as two dashes.
  • This project or activity has the capacity to impact the community:
  • This project impacts:
  • To have the biggest impact, this project needs support from:
  • The mini grant project(s) in my story impact:
  • The story I shared shows the importance of:
  • In my story, things went:
  • The story shows:

Working on Center for Child Counseling’s…

Working on Center for Child Counseling’s training, Healing the Healers: Creating Happy Healthy Healers and a Happy Healthy Workforce, during this global pandemic has been an interesting and eye-opening endeavor. In our lifetime, there has never been a more challenging time in health and mental health care in terms of the major stressors professionals and clients/patients alike are experiencing at the same time. Working as a helper/healer has always been a challenging and stressful career choice, although for those who survive and thrive in such careers long-term, we also find tremendous reward, satisfaction, and joy from our work. However, with the stress of COVID-19, as well as other concurrent stressors (racial unrest/violence, rise in hate speech and hate crimes, political polarization and upheaval) that we have experienced in the US in the past year, there has been significant rise in the need for both health and mental health care, pushing our medical mental health institutions/providers to the limit, and significantly and adversely impacting the well-being of many of helpers/healers, for example, increased rates of anxiety, depression, acute and posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicide seen in frontline healthcare workers.For helping and healing professionals, it has always been important for us to think and talk about stress, vicarious trauma, burnout, compassion fatigue, stress management, compassion satisfaction, resilience building, self-regulation, and self-care, although it is often overlooked or under-focused upon by our training programs, as well as supervisors and administrators in the institutions and agencies where we work. Honestly, I personally have significant regrets that I did not spend enough time on these topics in the many years I was an administrator overseeing and supervising a team of child trauma therapists. It is easy to overly focus on our interventions/treatments with our clients, measuring outcomes, paperwork, billing, etc., but doing so without concurrently focusing on the topics included in our Healing the Healers training is very short-sighted. Client care and health of our organizations/institutions directly relates to health and well-being of the individual workers. In the current climate, our need to focus on these topics is greatly magnified and must be in the forefront of our conversations as helpers/healers. The overused, but nevertheless very important analogy of putting your own oxygen mask on a plane during an emergency before helping others with theirs rings abundantly true today! Plus, the good news is that even in the face of COVID-19 and other concurrent societal stressors, there are strategies to combat stress on an individual and organizational level that can dramatically improve the well-being of all helpers/healers, including those most vulnerable to stress, and this, in turn, will lead to improved care of all of clients/patients and healthier, better-functioning organizations. With that being said, once our team completed a first draft of our Healing the Healers presentation, Power Point and notes, and the pandemic dragged on (with all the associated personal and professional issues it created for helpers/healers and their patients/clients alike), we realized that there was a need to expand this part of our presentation to include the latest anecdotal and research data on the impact COVID-19 was having on helping /healing professionals, and what support and assistance was most needed at this time. We have now done this, while continuing to monitor the emerging literature, so we can make any necessary updates to our presentation. At this point, we have a rich 4.5-hour Power Point presentation completed that covers the types and roles of helpers/heaters; causes and types of stress; biology/physiology of stress; ACEs and their relationship to stress and well-being; impacts of stress (burnout, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue); challenges faced by specific groups of helpers/healers (African-American and other minority and LGBTQ healers); COVID-19 and the impact on helpers/healers; and self-care, self-regulation, and resilience building. Our next step is to record the presentation, so we can the disseminate it before we as an organization are able to return to doing live trainings. Even though we cannot do this training live at this time, in addition to information we included in the training, we have added videos, role-plays, activities, and resources to make it as engaging and interactive as possible. We are stuck by how timely and important this training is for our community of helpers/healers, and we feel so grateful to have the opportunity and funding to do this at the very time it is so desperately needed.

In my mini grant experience…

In my mini grant experience it has beyond awesome! My first experience was involving the youth! I was to teach the kids about photography! We went out into the Glades and we share and compare personal feelings to the photos that were taken! We discussed how a picture has so many different meanings it was all about how you were able to look at it. I was able to give them a real hands on experience before COVID! My current mini grant has to do with getting back to basics! We are actually in process of building a garden retreat! Between planting and growing and teaching the youth in the same manner it helps them to appreciate the skills and value of bringing something to life and watching it grow! Also in the garden we have a buddy bench, to where your able to go and sit when it’s been a long day and you just need someone to talk to! Its so much more but I will rather wait until we reveal it!

One of the most effective…

One of the most effective Silver Fox outreach efforts is the Tiki Market Mini Sessions. This allows direct interaction with Seniors in the target zipcodes. I gathered more that 30 prospects over 2 days and converted 11 into clients and great prospects. Silver Fox provided more than 20 hours of complementary training to Seniors.

TV Interview

TV Interview

Community Partners of South Florida invited me to participate in an interview about the Digital Gap Initiative. It was awesome. What a perfect way to end this mini grant cycle. I’ve made great partnerships and I’m ready to go. What a wonderful opportunity for my business start-up. Thank you so very much Healthier Palm Beach and Community Partners of South Florida.

New Logo

New Logo

This new logo better represent Silver Fox Elite Fitness. It’s beautiful.

My experience of this mini-grant….

My experience of this mini-grant was one where the kids that attended the Theater Appreciation/Monologue Acting Workshop were free to express themselves in their own, unique way. They expressed what they wanted to get out of the workshop, what they came to work on, and what their biggest “take-aways” at the end of the 2-hour workshop. I experienced them experiencing connection with everyone there, a safe and sacred space, creating value through creative self-expression, exploring their passions, and building their experience/expertise and knowledge around that workshop’s topics. We could’ve stayed longer than the 2 hour-window we had set and scheduled for this specific workshop! The participants/kids attending had shown real potential and talent in their self-chosen monologue acting, expressed their gratitude for the workshop and those other participants/kids around them in the workshop as well as myself leading it, and really impressed the adults there including myself with what words they used when sharing from their hearts all the way down to their performances at the end. They exhibited diversity amongst themselves with very different, relatable monologues that resonated with them and performed in their own, beautiful ways often using the word “dynamic” in what they wanted to work on and accomplish in the workshop. Hearing them share what value they created in those 2 hours warmed my heart. I see bright futures for these young actors and would love to do something like this again as soon as possible! The value in building confidence in these kids and connecting with them truly is priceless.

We have completed three courses…

We have completed three courses so far for our future leaders primarily for high schoolers in PBC. So far the theme has been on leadership development in which the courses focused on discovering your purpose, goal setting through vision boards, and tonight on public speaking. Every class has a keynote speaker who is a subject matter expert and each one so far as imparted seeds of knowledge, discovery and engagement. In many of the surveys so far, the youth have expressed that they never really thought about their purpose or that they didn’t know that every person on this planet was born with a purpose. A few of the youth shared their vision boards with me which is such a blessing. It shows how many goals some have and others are going through a discovery process of asking themselves about their goals–perhaps something they never really thought about let alone putting thoughts on virtual paper/canva LOL. Tonight, we had about 25 participants and ten of the youth participated in “table topics,” an opportunity to practice impromptu speaking on a host of topics that were age appropriate. One of the girls said that she never would have thought that she would share in a group setting and she wasn’t sure “how we did it.” What she was really saying was how did she get the courage to talk in front of people, even if by Zoom. These may seem like small wins but they’re huge to me. The next session will be on microaggressions and racial equity awareness. In March and April, the focus will be on financial awareness and in May and June, we will shift the focus to job preparedness. I may shift and provide courses outside this curriculum by partnering with another agency to discuss college preparedness. I love that I can be nimble and adjust to the needs of the students without heavy bureaucracy and red tape. Thank you BeWell PBC! I believe the impact to the youth is great and I can’t wait to see how their lives will be impacted by the time the Future Leaders graduation comes around in July.

This 12 week mini grant…

This 12 week mini grant opened my mind and heart to all 7 impact areas which in turn has truly assisted me in being a better me all around. I’m looking forward to part 2!