This reflection comes from WRAP facilitator Viv – apologies to her for not publishing this until now.
The title of the March WRAP Facilitator’s Network Meeting was “Dynamic WRAP”, and dynamic it certainly was!
After coffee and a wee bit of networking time, we got down to the business of the day.
To start with we paired up with someone we’d never met and shared information on our home area, our best WRAP moments, and what our HOPEs were for the day. It was interesting sharing background and facilitating experiences, such as mine are, with someone new, in fact from Tayside.
There were then “Market Place” style activities rotating around 4 stations.
My group started at “Peer Support Circle” with James Kennedy. We were asked as a Peer group to talk about what we might like to change/alter about WRAP. For me it was making the actual booklets more visually exciting and memorable. It seems that different areas of Scotland have produced their own versions of the handout booklet and it was agreed that it would be good to share these via Dropbox, Twitter and Facebook.
My next station was, “WRAP and Found Poetry”. I think the original idea was that we had a theme in mind, e.g. Hope, then we took a page from any publication, book, magazine, newspaper and coloured over/blotted out all but the words which seemed to relate to our theme. However we were also allowed to cut out and collage words and images to make this “Found Poem”.
Having only 15-20 minutes I settled on the word HOPE but related to mental health and women as it was International Women’s Day.
I tried to find other related words and themes that began with the letter H to create a pattern of alliteration. As ever with visual tasks, I got carried away and spent a further 20 minutes of my lunchtime finding, cutting, gluing and sticking.
I couldn’t bring myself to tear pages out of books and cover them in marker pen…just felt wrong having been brought up with books being near sacred – you didn’t even turn the corners of the pages in my house!
This activity was good as finding the words gave people a level of freedom, the available texts dictating in what direction the poem might go. I think we concentrated more on the finding aspect of the task and so didn’t panic about being asked to create a “poem” in under 20 minutes…I loved the variety of responses to the same task! (see photos).
The third station for my group was “Play with a Purpose” led by Graeme Nisbet, from Think Thrive. We were introduced to Card Sort, a range of activities using colour cards. The 4 blue cards read Very Important, Moderately Important, Slightly Important and Not Important At All. The set of orange cards had a variety of ‘needs’ on them and we had to sort them onto the 4 categories given on the blue cards. Most needs e.g. sleep, support, ended up on Very or Moderately Important, and we were asked to put aside the others.
Next we had to arrange purple cards to sort our Important Needs onto. This time the categories were Well Met, Reasonably Met, Slightly Met and Not Met. We had to pick up the cards that we’d placed on Not Met or Slightly Met and dispense with the others.
My Not Met cards related to SLEEP and TIME – no surprises there for anyone who knows me!!
Finally, out came the 4 green cards – I have a plan, I have a bit of a plan, I do not have a plan.
We them moved onto the Stay Afloat – Constructing a Plan for an Unmet Need. At that point we ran out of time, so this is something I must return to.
This activity was helpful in that it highlighted the areas I needed to work on without me consciously doing so – a little like a Wellness tarot reading! I would really like a set of three cards to see how they work for others.
The final element of the Market Place for me was “Constructing a value based WRAP”. This activity used megablocks which had daily activities and values chosen by the person constructing it. As it was explained but thete wasn’t time for any hands on activity, this made less of an impression on me, beyond the basic idea of using blocks to construct a more physical WRAP.
In the afternoon we took part in ‘Time2Wrap’ with John and two drama group members from Figmentum Productions.
We were all quaking in our boots when we heard that the entire afternoon was a participatory drama workshop. At school I was so shy and self-conscious that I absolutely hated drama, and it seemed I was not the only one who felt that way – however, it turned out to be a lot of fun.
We were split into 2 big groups of ten, which felt very different to our small group work in the morning.
It seemed initially that we were being asked to create group tableaus showing a range of seemingly unrelated things. As a group we had to use our bodies together to show the following:- a pepperoni pizza, a princess in a tower, a fire-breathing dragon, a knight on horseback and the Eiffel Tower. We compared responses between the two groups and were asked to remember what we were in each thing :- stuffed crust, tower wall, lower jaw, front left leg, tower leg. I thought maybe we had to do something combining the elements which we had represented, but no, as a group we had to make up a story, re-enacting the items pizza, princess, dragon etc, every time they were mentioned. The group made me narrator so I took great pleasure in mentioning the items as often as possible leaving the group scrabbling from princess formation to pizza, to dragon and back again!!
From what could have been a post lunch slump, we all ended up laughing and energised. We then did further physical portrayals of mental health and WRAP concepts.
Overall the day was inspiring! I tried a lot of new things, pushed out of my comfort zone to at times take risks, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
The day was put together by John Moody who came up to Elgin to co-facilitate our WRAP facilitator training in January. I think the whole concept of the day was brilliant and so creative.
It was a little sad to hear that John is stepping away from his position at Scottish Recovery Network but he said his commitment to WRAP remains and that he looks forward to co-facilitating with some of us, and will remain available to support and advise.
Great day, met lots of fab people and made new friends – and tried things I didn’t expect to enjoy!
So…when is the next one!?? 🙂
