What if people could see the effort, activities, and resources required of care and compassion more directly? What if we took a moment to think about how our actions and environments impact our wellbeing? How can this understanding help us improve our situation today and in the future?

This exciting, interactive workshop is designed to empower participants to better understand care in their lives and to strengthen their collective capacity to care for each other and their communities.

There are two goals for each course:

Seeing the invisible — Mapping Ourselves teaches participants how to use a set of pen-and-paper tools to observe, visualize, and analyze key aspects of living: relationships, interactions, activities, environments, etc. The Mapping Ourselves tools help people better understand their own lives, and how their lives are impacted by their context. By becoming more aware of themselves, they also become better able to understand (and care for) others. In addition, participants learn how to extend the ideas beyond the specific tools that are taught; they learn how to “practice science” in personal life.

Leveraging collective capacities — Mapping Ourselves is designed to spark and nurture rich social conversation. Participants learn by sharing their situations, drawings and reflections with each other. In the process they discover both the uniqueness of their individual situations as well as their common humanity. They also discover how and how much they can benefit, emotionally and practically, from talking with others in the program (and by extension, others in their larger community). Today, due to the relative lack of such social conversation, people’s knowledge and personally-discovered solutions are hidden to the rest of their communities. Through sparking social conversation, we unleash that community wisdom.

The workshop will be facilitated by Atlas of Caregiving.

Space is limited! To attend this workshop, please RSVP by February 27. For more information, call the Community Foundation at 231.924.5350. The workshop is free to attend and includes lunch. Attendance is open to health and human service organizations as well as those in caregiving situations, including young and old.

Atlas of Caregiving is a California-based nonprofit. Atlas’s extended team includes individuals with deep expertise in diverse areas, including business, science, technology, design, research, anthropology, family caregiving, and health.

This program is brought to Newaygo County in partnership with the Elderly Needs Fund (ENF) of Fremont Area Community Foundation and the Michigan Health Endowment. ENF is committed to building a quality caregiving structure in Newaygo County by providing opportunities to understand how we are all a part of the process.

Mapping Ourselves: The practice of personal science