By providing safe environments that encourage collaboration and artistic expression, we increase understanding and foster positive systems of change in our communities. Our programs are rooted in a culturally relevant, trauma-informed model.
Our Programs
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The goals of this program is to create more art and healing-centered experiences and to create space for people to experience their natural creative capacity for solution-making, in turn activating hope and peace building.
Story Quilt is a culturally relevant, ʻāina-based youth arts program that explores interconnection through art, environment, and cultural identity. This program serves youth, their ʻohana, and those who benefit from trauma-informed programs. These expansive, up to 9-foot art collaborations express collective perspective and deep-healing connections around the restoration and protection of our lands and waters.
Story Quilt offers culturally significant place-based practices in an outdoor space to cultivate participant awareness of their relationship with their environment and themselves. Cultural storytelling and personal exploration through the arts have supported participants' feelings of understanding and belonging.
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Since the 2023 Maui fires, we’ve delivered vital trauma-informed arts programs on Maui in shelters, public schools, and west side locations, offering essential support to impacted children and families. Our Maui programs work under the name La Ohana Arts, which is an extension of our Story Quilt program.
We experience expressive arts and relevant cultural practices as pathways of healing and reclamation. Through collaborations with local organizations like Maui Mutual Aid, Mauna Medics Healers Hui, public schools and local leadership, we’ve served over 300 Maui ohana.
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The Creative Community Workers (CCW) program teaches frontline workers simple therapeutic strategies to cope with stress, balance their emotional and mental well-being, and facilitate expressive spaces for service professionals to find more inspiration in their work. This program provides playful opportunities through art while forging deeper connections with other community leaders.
During the pandemic, these therapeutic spaces have helped participants find inspiration and connection in a time that was isolating and overwhelming. As of 2024, we offer regular, invite-only CCW programs to our Maui community of care.
Attendees have included nonprofit directors, program managers, community educators, social workers, and healthcare workers. We also provide training to youth service providers. By utilizing expressive arts to support mental health and social-emotional learning, they learn the skills to advocate for more healing strategies within the systems they work in.
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Wisdom Circles Oceania coordinates and is a founding partner of the ʻŌpio Protectors Network (OPN), a partnership of mental health, education, and youth development professionals who work together to create restorative frameworks for addressing harm and increasing safety in youth-serving programs across Hawaiʻi.
We provide project coordination, a restorative nature-based arts curriculum, and therapeutic spaces for youth to share their feedback.
For the past three years, we’ve occupied a key organizing role gathering a collaboration of organizations, community, and youth leaders to develop this work. Our collective vision is to create a framework for addressing and preventing harm that is survivor-centered, trauma-informed, and culturally relevant to the communities we serve.
Past collaborators included Hoʻopae Pono Peace Project, Weaving Our Stories, The Popolo Project, Hawaiʻi Women in Filmmaking, Sierra Club Hawaiʻi, and Oʻahu Water Protectors.
We strive to provide the following benefits with our programs:
Deepen understanding of personal kuleana and role for community-centered change
Provide tools for supporting mental and emotional well-being
Enhance collaborative problem-solving and responsible decision-making skills
Foster appreciation for natural systems thinking
Strengthen relationships with family, peers, and community
Utilize creative processes to ignite community engagement
Methods + Tools
We provide artistic healing experiences and kilo to reconnect to our innate abilities in creating natural working systems, for ‘āina and each other.
Our programs are rooted in a cultural and trauma-informed model, utilizing well-researched methods for facilitating self-discovery, change, and reparations. These programs offer participants safe places to think, feel, and relate by observing and experiencing Nature's working wisdom.
Learn more below!
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Trauma-Informed Expressive Arts Therapy integrates neurological research on how the brain processes trauma with the sensory process of art-making to support healing and recovery. This process provides participants active opportunities to experience their capabilities in learning to self-regulate and build new positive sensory memories and relationships. By uplifting strengths rather than labeling pathologies, and viewing each individual as capable, supports a resiliency-based framework for understanding a person's trauma reactions.
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In Hawaiian culture, kilo is the practice of observation to understand one’s surroundings and environment over time. Kilo is used to learn, experience, and discover the most effective processes to better plan for the future. This could include climate, agriculture, spirituality, and innovation.
We integrate our workshops within ecological frameworks and place-based cultural practices that build awareness of relationships to ʻāina and each other. These activities help increase resilience, improve mental health, and develop a practice of deep observation and examination, in turn cultivating leadership, community, and responsibility.
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Eco-Art Therapy blends traditional art therapy with the emerging science of Applied Ecopsychology (an experiential modality, which teaches us to think, feel and relate by observing and experiencing Nature's wisdom).
This experiential art-meets-nature process helps us identify and release underlying and conditioned beliefs more easily than conventional verbal counseling.
We're able to witness nature's wisdom through a process of creation and art, observation, feeling, and journaling, which gives us powerful revelations and an understanding of wholeness.
Ecopsychology studies the effects of nature on our well being and its natural ability to release and heal trauma. Through this process, we're also remembering our connection to our ancient wisdom.
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Creativity Coaching supports people in working through creative blocks like procrastination, overwhelm, perfectionism, and self-sabotage. This coaching methodology is based on extensive research on the brain and creativity.
It helps us learn techniques for building new muscle habits that feel good and help us to continue showing up for ourselves. It's about having fun, starting with what's easy, and utilizing tools that help us allow creativity to flow.
Through gently acknowledging old patterns, habits, and fears, we learn more about ourselves and how to treat ourselves with our own innate wisdom.
