Highlighting Resilience with Famconnet
My overall experience working with FamConnect has been positive and rewarding. Famconnect is a therapy center that supports students. The intervention we are developing will be used to help adolescent girls who have experienced gender based violence. In our initial discussions it seemed like we would have issues with deciding on a meeting time that worked for everyone involved. Luckily we have been able to meet weekly with meeting topics ranging from culture, specifics of the intervention, research done by famconnect in relation to gender based violence, and meeting with teachers and students. We have been fortunate to work with project mentor Dr. Lillian Ayiro who has been extremely forthcoming and informative and never fails to address our questions and concerns.
Group work typically poses challenges with communication and division of work. While I do feel that it is challenging to centralize information, our group has done a great job communicating with one another. While we have been able to divide our work, Sam Gordon has been instrumental in communicating with Famconnect and keeping our group organized. I personally feel that it has been difficult to manage the workload with other classes as I feel that the issue we are trying to address deserves more time than I can give.
When designing our intervention we have had to consider many factors, such as culture, age of the girls, technological constraints, and accessibility for those who will run the intervention. For the majority of the semester we deliberated using group pm+ and adapting it for our context. Instead we have decided to do an intervention inspired by group pm+ but tailored to our context and group’s needs. It seemed that training the teachers in pm+ was going to be a challenge due to the hours required for training. We have instead opted to create a toolkit inspired by group pm+ but tailored to our context. In addition, we plan to add a card game based intervention. Inspired by the lecture from guest speaker Luma Makari, who mentioned a non-traditional intervention approach “Migrant camp: coffee hour circle for women of the community with a clinical therapist facilitating.” We discussed ways that we could facilitate a common group activity for adolescent girls. We landed on the idea of incorporating cards into the intervention to incorporate aspects of play while facilitating therapeutic discussion.
Our group was fortunate enough to meet the students who are the target of our intervention, which was helpful and brought many details to mind for example, who are the people the girls trust in the community, concerns around sexual and reproductive health, and the girls feeling a lack of community. It has sometimes felt difficult for me to conceptualize a gamification element to therapy about such serious subject matter. However, hearing from the girls that they have established and cherished games brings to mind ways we can bring joy and community to this space based on pre established resilience.
We are now in the process of studying pm+ and similar interventions to decide which aspects would be most useful in our context and toolkit, and what we can build upon. I sometimes find it overwhelming to develop the content of the intervention as we want the intervention to have a long lasting positive impact. At the same time, we have a lot of encouragement from Dr. Lillian Ayiro which has inspired our group to continue working with Famconnent after the end of the semester.
Image by Rita Bulatova
