Greater Charlottesville TICN All-Community Open Network Meeting 2024

Murals

The Greater Charlottesville Trauma-Informed Community Network partnered with The Bridge PAI to complete our very first youth engagement project. It was our intent to educate the youth participants on the impacts of adversity and trauma on health, and how to use resilience to improve health and well-being throughout the lifespan. We were able to bring together nine youth from several high schools in our community, and share with them this awareness, and what we believe to be essential skills. We in-turn hope that these youth would help us further our efforts by passing along what they learned to their peers and others.  

            Creating the Murals involved using the skills taught to brainstorm images that relate to resilience encouraged from their own perspective, asking the question of what resilience now meant to each of them. Those images were then transferred onto canvas under the guidance of an artist. The Murals gave life to the experience, and made the knowledge more retainable.

            The completed murals were then unveiled at our All-Community Open Network Meeting. We were able to honor the participating youth, all while inviting the whole community to take part in it. The project was successful in showing our youth the importance of resilience. How to ask for help and how to advocate for self. We hope that everyone involved took away a sense of community and showing up for each other. This meeting was also an opportunity to invite more members from the community to get involved.