Art & Creativity for Healing (ACFH) will celebrate 10 years of offering unique Art4Healing® workshops for children and adults suffering from abuse, illness, grief or stress; on-site and at hospitals and non-profit agencies. ACFH facilitates the creative process while encouraging emotional healing—and these two paths often intersect when words are not adequate, and pain is too deep. Our mix of artistic development and expression coupled with a creative healing model allows participants to learn a new way of communicating through color that encourages emotional breakthroughs and further enhances the therapy process. Unlike other art programs that employ a loose format of free expression, our curriculum contains strictly guided exercises (guided by our trained facilitators) and is designed to elicit emotional responses.

Since our inception, we have directly fostered transformational change in more than 25,000 children, women and families who have found our creative intervention a valuable tool to address the often unbearable pain in their lives. With over 35 non-profit program partners in Southern California we have created an effective methodology for reaching people in pain.

Our current workshop curriculums are tailored for four specific programs: women and their children who have been victimized by domestic violence at Human Options; children and teens from economically challenged families struggling with anger, abuse and dysfunction (the 14 Families and Communities Together sites); children hospitalized with cancer in long-term care at Children’s Hospital in Orange County (CHOC), and the program for which we are outlining, Healing for Heroes and their Families, working with Camp Pendleton’s infantry families with a parent ready to be/or already deployed.