The story behind Creative Life Story Work

All of Blue Cabin’s work is centred around creativity. We know that taking part in trauma informed, creative activities together can help care experienced children and young people build stronger relationships with those around them. And we know that creativity can support post-traumatic growth when delivered in a trauma-informed way.

But we needed to bring on board an expert in life story work, to ensure that whatever we did and whatever we built was informed by that expertise. So we approached the wonderful Richard Rose, the founder of Therapeutic Life Story Work International. Richard understood instinctively how Blue Cabin’s creative approach could work. He was immediately willing to get involved and basically said ‘Sign me up!’.

The Creative Life Story Work model is informed by Richard’s three tier model of Therapeutic Life Story Work. The All About Me tier – which helps children explore who they are today and to express their hopes for the future – was where we felt we could develop a group, creative approach.

All of Blue Cabin’s work centres creativity. And we’ve seen what a creative approach can bring when we’re supporting children and young people who have experienced adversity – it can support them to reflect, to play, and to have conversations with people in their lives.

Creativity is also a mechanism to describe and reflect on people’s experiences in a safe and creative way – whether that’s through drawing, writing, crafting, poetry, making a picture or writing a letter.

And using creative tools is also a way to document the process: those conversations, ideas, and thoughts can be captured through drawing, writing, crafting or making.

In 2020, we were awarded funding from the What Works Centre for Social Care to roll out the Creative Life Story Work approach to two other local authorities in the North East of England.

We had lots of resources and lots of training that had been devised. We felt it was our responsibility to make that available to others – especially given that life story work guidance is not readily available to practitioners and local authorities. So in 2022, we set about bringing all of those resources, training and tools together into one place.

This became the Creative Life Story Work website and membership package.

One of the unique things about Creative Life Story Work is that it is built with the support of Blue Cabin’s associate artists. They’re professional artists who understand social pedagogy and trauma informed approaches. And they’re all experts in co-creating with care experienced children and young people.

We also work with experts in practice like Richard Rose, Polly Baynes, Dr Karen Treisman and Katie Wrench, who have all delivered Live Classrooms with us and who have created resources and toolkits for our website. .

And there’s our core team. That includes Freya Gill Stevens, our membership officer; Joanne Stoddart, our Local Authority specialist; and Dawn Williams, our podcast host. And our brilliant freelance specialists support us in areas including web development, marketing and podcast producing.

They’re all experts in what they do, and together we are constantly learning, reflecting and strengthening Creative Life Story Work so we can support as many people as possible to deliver excellent life story work.

And of course, as Creative Life Story Work is delivered by Blue Cabin which is a registered charity, it helps to support our mission to develop and strengthen relationships between care experienced individuals and the people in their lives through trauma informed creative activities. And all memberships support our charitable work.

Thank you Jenny for sharing the story of Creative Life Story Work!