In the second part of your EVS experience you have the chance to create a personal project. So I did
The planning and the idea development started in July. The whole project took place during 3 months: August-September-October. The main topic is Art Therapy through painting clothes with our children and teenagers.
Now we are just 3 days away from the big event: Happiness Fashion Show on 28th of October in the city library from 3 PM.
The preparation for this event has been an exciting journey that involved many activities, people and emotions. So far we’ve had:
~ 10 Creative Workshops painting clothes
We’ve had 7 art therapy workshops with our children and teenagers in the houses and social apartments.
We covered topics like Emotional Intelligence, Self-expression, Creativity, Self-Awareness and others. The goal was to have the children really think how do they feel, who they are in that specific moment and express themselves, their thoughts, emotions, inner world through art on the clothes.
They have done an Amazing Job!
Adeline and me participated with them in some of the workshops and we managed to feel how relaxing and calming activity is to paint clothes expressing yourself
We organized 2 Open Creative Workshops in the library where we had local teenagers joining us in creating pieces of art with personal stori
Our topics were Happiness and Stress Relief. Basically we had a short discussion what makes us happy, what is happiness for us and later they created their awesome art pieces of Happiness
The second workshop was about focusing on what relaxes us when we are stressed. The teenagers had to paint the shapes or whatever that will help them feel better if they were under stress. We managed to create beautiful recycled clothes again
In these workshops we managed to impact and engage a bit more than 40 people. All of the clothes from the open creative workshops were donated to the foundation and will be presented during the Fashion show. Together we created 66 clothes.
~ 7 Paper Flower Workshops
In order to promote the Happiness Fashion Show we organized 7 Paper Flower Making Workshops where we made around 900 lotuses in different colors.
We had these workshops in our foundation’s houses and social apartment, the city library, a school and the office of one of our partners, “Smile” organization.
Approximately 50 people were involved in those activities: children, teenagers, educators, other EVS volunteers in Valcea and local people
~ Promoting & Fundraising Event
These flowers were used to say “Thank you” for people’s donations during an event that we organized on 20th of October. With the precious help or “Smile” organization we had 22 people going around Ramnicu Valcea for promoting the big event on 28th and collecting any donations for its realization.
~ TV Appearances
We had the great opportunity to talk about this project twice on a local TV channel: VTV CROSS FINGERS for the big event – Happiness Fashion Show
