When I look collectively at what our group has achieved together, I'm so proud of their work over the eleven years that I've worked with them. Then I think about what can we do next?
What will help them evolve and their development, I also reflect on the time that we spent during COVID and how I still think there is a period of time for which we are still in a healing phase. We are still building our own resilience and safety. The sense of harm. Still working our way through grief and the varying stages of what that might be for each of us. We also had much upheaval in our organization during that time. I think about what that means for a person with disabilities that might not have as much capacity to verbalize as I do. So how can I support that person or persons in finding where best way through this experience? To navigate that for themselves.
Sometimes you can have already done the work. I think that was a big takeaway for me over the holiday period that you can work harder than you need to and overcomplicate something.
I have in fact had already done the work for my participants when I created a piece of digital work called Pick a Path during the pandemic. I thought that what I would do is take the digital program that I had created I would turn this into a live program so that they could experience these things or take the option of choosing these things for themselves.
Pick a path was born. It has five elements to it, which makes it unique. It's based on our participants. And the different skills, needs of the people in the room. It also has a sort of built in flexibility that. It can roll with the weather and unexpected changes that happen. Also with the energetic levels of people depending on how they are on the day.
Here's what they are.:
Play: If you feel like playing games and doing something lighthearted.
Create: This is for you if you feel like doing something expressive and creative.
Discover: This is for adventurers who love to discover the outdoors.
Discuss: We are all connected, what are our stories?
Perform: Putting together our skills and creating with physicality
Digitize: introducing participants to a more personalized way of building connection with people.
Our participants are given an opportunity to choose From the box and from that I'm able to form a session in which I'm able to create our pick a path session.
We are often able to blend across the topics to meet various needs of personality and ability in the room.
We have enjoyed greater flexibility within the program being able to adapt to weather, people's movement and environmental changes this is allowed us the ability to change at a moment's notice and feel no resistance or stress about doing that and find the joy in pulling out a journal or a costume.
As the year has progressed it has seen us explore the subjects quite broadly both enjoying indoor and outdoor setting for exploration and having a journal to base our work in.
You will be able to see more of our journey through my individual articles on what we have been up to.
It has been an absolute pleasure to walk alongside these beautiful creatives in their journey this year.