Healing Hearts Research Paper

Focus on Refugees
• No, refugees do not use Healing Hearts.
• Yes, tremendously so! Healing Hearts is all about sorting through the big feelings of leaving your home, losing your loved ones, and being in a new place. Refugees feel all of these and more, because they are also adjusting to a new culture. This must bring up difficult feelings, which can be upsetting and confusing. Healing Hearts could help them sift through these and find valuable ways to deal with these feelings. Healing Hearts also helps a verity of ages, the minimum age being seven, and there not being a maximum age. This means that most refugees who understand what has happened to them would be able to benefit from Healing Hearts.
• Yes, I think Healing Hearts would be
interested in expanding their clients to refuges. The program is geared toward foster kids, so there would need to be some adjustments made to the activities or games played. The best way to increase refugee access to Healing Hearts would be to advertise about Healing Hearts or make it a mandated program that the refugees must attend while adjusting to America. In practice Healing Hearts would not actually be able to expand or change their clientele, because all funding has been cut, this makes running the program extremely difficult. Refugees need translators, transportation arrangements, and flexible hours that they can attend because of trying to balance work and school. Healing Hearts would be so beneficial to refugees but the resources need to execute this expansion would be too much.
• Refugees might avoid Healing Hearts because it requires them to relive their harsh past. They are instructed to feel debilitating pain over and over again, and for someone who is in denial will probably avoid these feelings at al costs. Healing Hearts may also be a culture shock depending on where the refugees came from, some cultures from upon showing or discussing emotion. This may also deter them from coming because it goes against what they believe. The program requires a lot of trust between the volunteers and the clients, and forming those bonds can be extremely difficult because of language barriers, or a lack of cultural awareness.
Reflection
• Yes, I would do service here, I’m actually signed up to continue for the rest of my college career.
I’ve been apart of Healing Hearts for a little over a year now, and it has become such an important part of my week. I love working with the kids and the other volunteers, everyone is usually in such high spirits even on the tough nights. The confusion between love and pain that these kids feel and then ultimately share with us, brings a desire to help and support these young minds as they fight for clarity in their lives. I wouldn’t trade being their support system for anything in the world.
• Yes, Healing Hearts helps the foster children immensely. Once that rapport is built the children crave an escape from their feeling. Healing Hearts becomes the outlet with likeminded people that share the same situation as the kids. Healing Hearts creates a community that the kids can rely on. For the most part Healing Hearts lives up to its expectations. It falls short when you look at the teen group, and how it has diminished over the years, because no one showed up to it. Although Healing Hearts is court mandated, it is left up to the foster parents to get the kids there. This can be difficult if the foster parents have a lot of kids, or kids from different agencies. This complicates things because they can be torn between driving to one agency to another. There are also just some foster parents who don’t see it necessary for the kids or they see it as an inconvenience.
The program its self does the best it can with what it has to work with.
• As a volunteer who was much younger than the average volunteers that worked with Healing Hearts, I was treated exactly the same. I was hands-on with the kids almost more so than the other women because I also accompanied them in the Volcano room. I had the same responsibilities as the other woman, there wasn’t much else I could have done to benefit Healing Hearts, I even helped prepare for up coming activities earlier in the week, which the other volunteers did not do.
• In addition to having Healing Hearts every other Thursday of the month, Julie should rotate out volunteers to help her set up for the activity earlier that week.
This way everyone sees how much work is truly put into making Healing Hearts great and it exposes the others to how to manage or keep the program running after Julie leaves. This would also increase the bond among volunteers creating a tighter community for the kids to be apart of.
• The staff at Healing Hearts is amazing they are all retired social workers, or currently social workers that take time out of their day to stay after work and provide this opportunity to foster kids. One woman even drives from Virginia Beach to Healing Hearts. They are all trained in social work, and know the inner workings of the system. A few even work for the agencies that some of the kids are from so they have an insiders view on the kids case, which can help us alter the activities in a way that will maximize the kids
benefit.
• Do it! Volunteer with Healing Hearts, you will meet the most warm-hearted, fun loving, people who truly care about these kids. Strangely enough a lot of what we talk about with the kids is applicable to college life, because we are away from our parents, in a new environment, with a lot of confusing feelings so you tend to learn a lot about yourself through the activities as well. The feeling that you get while helping these kids is unmatched anywhere else. I have volunteered before as a camp counselor, at food banks, at Toys for Tots, and in community gardens, but Healing Heart has impacted my life so profoundly that I want others to experience the joy of helping these children, and the joy that they get from just being in the group. Watching them transform and work through the difficult times in their lives, really puts life into perspective and I’ll be forever grateful for that.