Melissa Call
Power in Poetry
Strategic Organizational Communications
Project Summary: I did research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and how they impact people. I found that 61% of adults have reported having one ACE, and 1 in 6 people reported having more than one. ACE’s are any experiences that are traumatizing to the child, abuse, neglect, even divorce and suicide of a family member. This is a significant issue plaguing our society. I wanted to see how I could help children who struggle with having ACEs. I have always been passionate about Poetry and it’s healing effects.
I decided I wanted to see how applying Poetry to this particular situation, could help. What I found was writing in any form, including poetry has the ability to help people learn to express their emotions. This skill comes with it the benefits of depression and anxiety going down, and the ability to reform problems, make decisions and attaining goals goes up.
More than that Poetry has the ability to give people control over these traumatizing experiences by writing about it. In fact I found in my research, “Both writing and psychotherapy provide an opportunity for each individual to create a ‘second story’ that makes sense of experience…”
Next I took my research and modeling after Poetry Therapy, I came up with a workshop that could be pitched to schools and other places where this would be beneficial. The workshop would have facilitators that bring poems tied to an emotion that they want to work on that week. The would discuss the emotions, the poem and would be given an opportunity to write a poem about this emotion as well.
I also came up with outcomes that we could gather data for, whether it is helping the students or not. Such as if their standard testing scores go up after the workshop. Wellbeing outcomes that could be measured would have to do with measure how they feel depression or anxiety fared after the workshop.
Video:
Summary of Hours:
Research: 37 hours
Power Point: 10 hours
Putting Together Presentation: 6 hours
Meeting with Mentor: 3 hours
Total: 56 hours
Presentation: This is the presentation I would essentially be giving to pitch to schools about my workshop, it also has the outline for the workshop within the presentation.