Art & Creativity for Healing, Inc.

The Art4Healing® method facilitates the creative process while encouraging emotional healing, self-expression, and self-exploration. Our trained and certified Art4Healing® facilitators guide each 2-¬hour Art4Healing® workshop with curriculum specifically designed to support emotional healing through creative expression to teach participants new and creative ways to say things with paint that they do not have words for. Following each workshop, participants are given art materials to take home with them in order to empower and encourage each participant's journey at home using the Art4Healing® techniques that they learned in the workshop. We have highlighted our goals for each program below:

“Art4Healing® Raging Colors: Expressive Painting for Teens" Program: to teach teens that art can be a constructive part of their everyday lives and a positive way to communicate tough issues that have negatively affected them or derailed their emotional growth.

“Art4Healing®: Out of the Darkness: Women Survivors" Program: To introduce participants to art and allow them to create a series of abstract works of art that will bring to the surface their personal journey with abuse, abandonment & emotional trauma.

“Visiting Art Angel Bedside" Program at Children's Hospital in Orange County (CHOC): To provide pediatric patients in long-term care and their siblings in the Hematology/Oncology and Bone Marrow Transplant units one-on-one bedside visits using drawing, painting, and sculpture techniques to help children experiencing cancer express their feelings through art.

"Healing for Heroes and their Families" Program: To provide active duty service members, their families, and veterans with tools & resources for professional development, deployment, family separation, stress, resettlement, and/or injuries, and transition to civilian life.

“Creative Tools for the Homeless Children & Their Families" Program: To offer participants the opportunity to create a series of abstract works of art that will bring to the surface their personal journey with homelessness and will teach participants a new and creative way to express the feelings and emotions that are unique to growing up without a permanent place to call home.

“Vintage Colors: Art4Healing® Over 60" Program: To offer participants the opportunity to create a series of abstract works of art that will bring their personal journey with aging to the surface.

Our goals include continuing to serve the community through our existing programs as well as expanding and launching new curriculum for various programs to serve diverse populations of suffering individuals. A few of our selected goals for the next 3 years include the following:

Expand “Art4Healing® Raging Colors: Expressive Painting for Teens" Program for suffering teens that are experiencing bullying, exposure to drugs and alcohol, peer pressure, teen pregnancy, depression, and low self-esteem. In addition, we are launching a new Anti-Bullying 4-week series specifically designed for our "Raging Colors: Expressive Painting for Teens" program. This new curriculum allows the students to expand upon his or her experiences with bullying, kindness, and empathy.

Expand our “Healing for Heroes and their Families" Program by offering more workshops to our returning veterans and their families to facilitate more workshops in North Orange and Los Angeles Counties.

Expand our “Art4Healing®: Out of the Darkness: Women Survivors" Program by offering more workshops to survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking in partnership with Human Option, CSP Inc.—Waymakers, and others agencies.

Expand “Vintage Colors: Art4Healing Over 60" Program for the underserved, low-income senior population of Orange County living with the challenges of aging, including loneliness, grief, stress, fear, economic hardship or illness. We are expanding to North Orange County.

Expand our “Visiting Art Angel Bedside" Program by offering three-times weekly one-on-one bedside art sessions for children in long-term care at Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) and now also, Southern California Hospice Foundation for patients & family members.

Expand our “Creative Tools for Homeless Children & Their Families" Program by weekly workshops for homeless children and their families in partnership with Project Hope Alliance, American Family Housing Shelter for the Homeless, The Illumination Foundation, Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, and the OC Rescue Mission.

The Art4Healing® method is a creative process that encourages emotional healing. Individuals do not need a background in art or come from an artistic background to participate—we continually encourage those who have never painted to experience a workshop. Due to the accessibility of the Art4Healing® Method, we are not limited to one specific demographic or location and this allows our non-profit to serve more people in our community. Through building community partnerships with hospitals, non-profit organizations, city programming agencies, and other partner agencies, we are able to collaborate with various sites and serve various demographics with our Art4Healing® Method. For example, we serve homeless children and their families, at-risk youth, active military members, and more populations.

Art & Creativity for Healing, Inc.'s programs are funded through foundation grants, corporate grants and sponsorships, individual donations and fundraising, and our social enterprise of training and certifying Art4Healing® Facilitators in the Art4Healing® Method. Our social enterprise of certifying members of the larger community, and internationally (through our new Art4Healing International Certificate program), we are able to ensure future funding for our programs.

With these funds, Art & Creativity for Healing, Inc. is able to train and contract 18 Art4Healing® Facilitators to lead 40-50 Art4Healing® workshops in Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego Counties monthly. Through these workshops, we serve over 4,000 children and adults annually. We also have over 100 volunteers that assist during our Annual Palette of Colors Dinner & Auction Gala, as office helpers, assist our Facilitators during various partner agency workshops, and other events. Our HeARTs for Healing Women's Guild are members of the community who volunteer their time to be advocates for Art & Creativity for Healing, Inc. These women specifically help with fundraising events, such as our Palette of Colors Gala, and our Annual Healing Art Box Giveaway where we give out over 1,200 shoeboxes filled with 10 new art supplies to homeless children and children of the deployed in San Onofre School on Marine Base Camp Pendleton.

Since 2000, Art & Creativity for Healing, Inc. has offered Art4Healing® therapeutic workshops free of charge to over 35 hospitals, military facilities, community organizations, and partner non-profits where children and their families can give pain a voice and meaning through expressive abstract painting workshops. To date, we have facilitated Art4Healing® workshops to more than 90,000 children and adults suffering from pain, grief, fear or stress.

For the past 8 years, Art & Creativity for Healing, Inc. has impacted 1000 children annually through our “Healing Art Box Giveaway" to underprivileged children in Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego Counties, in addition to the children of the deployed on Marine Base Camp Pendleton. (Each “Healing Art Boxes" contains 10 new art supplies valued at $20 per box) To date, we have given away over 10,000 Healing Art Boxes to children in need.

In 2018, we launched a new Art4Healing® International Certificate Program and offered our Art4Healing® training on a worldwide and web-based platform. From New Zealand to Cyprus and back to the United States, we are able to reach new and different demographics of individuals through this new program. In 2020 we added Art4Healing LIVE workshops and classes to expand our reach with our unique methodology. In 2021 we focused on the mental health benefits of expressive art and wrote a white paper addressing this topic. We developed curriculum called "Beyond Covid" in response to the detrimental effects Covid has had on mental health, especially on the teen population's mental health. The at-risk teens we serve have attested that they "speak better with paint" after taking our classes.