Lifecrafting

“Anything you can imagine, is real.” - Pablo Picasso The 20th Anniversary Celebrations of The Foundation for Art & Healing inspired us to envision a connected, flourishing world. Together, we explored the Foundation's transformative impact on personal and public health through creative expression over the last 20 years and caught a glimpse of big, bold plans for the next 20 years! Lifecrafting was thrilled to collaborate with the Foundation in co-creating a creative play experience, an exhilarating launchpad for fun and festivities! Our heartfelt gratitude to Christian Doucette, Jeremy Nobel and the entire team at The Foundation for Art & Healing for inviting us to be part of your special celebrations. One of the play stations invited people to write a pledge, a promise to connect - “what is your everyday promise to make your world more connected?” Connection Promises poured in… Making a call to someone you haven’t seen in a long while | Saying hi to people you don’t know just because | Giving free compliments | Hold space for the little things | Make it a point to engage on elevators | I tell my barista at my go to cafe that her latte is great! | Make eye contact | I want to be present and really listen | Bring the generations together | Be curious about others | Be more open to sharing how I ‘really’ am | Share my poetry with someone new… and many many more… It is in the little everyday things. Much like a pebble dropped into a pond, these little things send out ripples, touching and shaping the world around us in ways we may not always immediately perceive. Lifecrafting is inspired to creating a borderless, living gallery of Social Connection Promises, celebrating the actions each of us takes and inspiring others on their journey. This is obviously a collective endeavor. Contributing your connection pledge here takes less than a couple of minutes, and committing to your tiny but very mighty daily act requires as much time. Join us, share with people and add your connection inspiration to our gallery. https://lnkd.in/gbGZ7AHQ #socialhealth #socialconnection #loneliness #creativeliving Huge thank you to all the beautiful humans who made the celebrations so inspiring and joyous!

The Social Prescribing Innovation Network is back for 2024-2025, with a completely transformed offer! We’ve developed and refined our offer to provide organisations delivering social prescribing with more opportunities to connect, learn and grow. The new network empowers those delivering social prescribing to connect, collaborate and shape solutions to improve social prescribing. Membership is free and gives access to: ? Members-only digital platform Innovation Network Platform ? Exclusive networking opportunities ? Bespoke events ? Opportunities to promote your membership Apply now to be part of the movement: https://ow.ly/HveA50TOcMq

What a night! ???? ?? We’re feeling grateful, energized, and inspired after an unforgettable 20th Anniversary Celebration with the Foundation for Art & Healing community. Thank you to all who joined us at our art activation stations! We loved sharing and connecting through creative activities like blind portraits and 6-word stories. Thank you to our speakers Kate Snow, Myrna Chao, Dr. Joel Katz, Christina Norman, and Steve Buscemi for giving such inspirational remarks on the healing power of creative expression. And thanks to Catherine Cabeen for getting us dancing and to Brett Phares for introducing us to the power of arts in projection! Thank you to Alvin Ailey Studios for providing the perfect setting for our gathering, to Lifecrafting for collaborating on our creative arts programming, to Awakened Films for documenting the evening, and to aweStruct for lighting up the night with a dazzling display of digital art. And thank you to our board, staff, volunteers, and generous supporters for all you’ve done to advance our efforts at the intersection of art-making and public health. We look forward to even more collaboration and connection in the years to come! We’ll be sharing Awakened Films’ official photos and videos of the celebration soon, but in the meantime, here are some candids from last night! Cindy Elkins Myrna Chao Robert Murphy Arnell Hinkle Marco Diaz Niyum Gandhi Deborah Obalil Marc Lieberstein Jen Martin Christian Doucette Charlotte Reynders Rachel Bitterfield Jeremy Nobel

When CoGenerate opened applications for a five-week Community of Practice to unite innovators interested in cogenerational strategies for reducing #loneliness and #socialisolation, I applied with urgency and delight. Today, we kicked off the community practice in a buzzing Zoom session filled with 166 incredible innovators across 8 countries and 30 states who believe #cogeneration is key to reducing social isolation. Across both the in-person and online experiences we have designed and hosted so far at Lifecrafting, we have not been as intentional about being intergenerational as we would have loved, and were just beginning to explore ways to design and make play more so. CoGenerate’s Community of Practice is a timely gift to Lifecrafting, wings to our fledgling cogeneration ideas and make them more integral to the upcoming experiences and products we design. Another aspect I've loved about applying to programs such as this is how the application process makes your '#why' clearer to yourself. Every time you write, refine, and repeat, your 'why' becomes more intimate to you. Cogeneration as an integral part of social connection and bringing play back into our lives is deeply personal to me. My grandmom was, is, and will be my best friend ever, and I've learned the most about what it means to be human from her. Over the years, I have also realized that I’m the most alive when am in the company of senior humans and toddlers! The spectrum of stories ranges from deep lived experiences to wild, unhinged wisdom and unscripted joy that always unfolds in their midst. So, personally, I have always been inspired to create experiences (for myself!) and everyone where we thrive with intergenerational pals. ?? Leaving you with a Zulu proverb that I heard for the first time thanks to today's session - 'umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,' translating to "A person is a person through other people." On #WorldMentalHealth Day, it was such a joy and honor to kick off this community of practice and be in the midst of such inspiring company. Thank you, CoGenerate, Janet Oh , Marci Alboher and the whole team for creating this digital sanctuary and for the opportunity! https://lnkd.in/e_b55XAG

As some of you know, I was on a 'slowbatical' for most of this year. The slowbatical, beyond serving as a pace reset, gifted me a precious liminal space I didn't know I needed. I treated this as an 'identity timeout' to release my attachment to who I once was and to figure out who I might become. Towards this end, I self-prescribed creative play that took me to fresh experiences, and incredible individuals. Delighted by play and how it weaved in purpose so lightly without being prescriptive, I became more intentional about surrounding myself with more of these experiences by creating a community and curiosity container rooted in play. We hosted over 20 play-anchored experiences, pop-ups IRL in Seattle, NYC, Bali, and 4 cities in India. It was beautiful to see strangers coming together, holding and steering safe spaces while bringing their truest selves through creative expression. Together, we realized how play and being in a playground-like space/ mindset effortlessly brings back wonder, flow, and belonging. I then started diving into the wealth of research on play and its impact on well-being, I will post about these episodically! Little did I know that my personal quest was transforming into a collective quest. In the liminal space, a seed was sown, and the tiny shoot emerging is called Lifecrafting, eager to play, much like all of us. As I resume work with renewed energy at Amazon in October, I'm beyond inspired to embark on a quest to build a world where social health flourishes through play. In the midst of a rampant global #loneliness epidemic—where 1 in 2 adults in America report experiencing loneliness, 330 million adults worldwide endure weeks without talking to family or friends, and stress-related absenteeism attributed to loneliness costs employers an estimated $154 billion annually in the US alone—the future of health is undoubtedly social. Global movements like #socialprescribing are already revolutionizing how we think about healthcare, starting with "What matters to you?" instead of "What is the matter with you?" #Play starts with the same premise, "What matters to you?" And somewhere between childhood and adulthood, most of us stopped playing. We are inspired to reintegrate play—in spaces, both physical and digital, and in mindsets, individual, communal and societal. We are not building in stealth; we are building through Play with you. We are not fixed on the means to realize our vision, nor are we rushing to (force)-fit technology. We are excited to explore different pathways that integrate more play and playgrounds into our lives. If you are passionate about play, #socialhealth, making the world more connected, we'd love to connect with you. Send me a message, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. And if you'd like to follow our journey on LinkedIn, here you go - https://bit.ly/3TAn9dR The more, the merrier. Stay tuned for more play! ??♀?