ARC Art Hive - Arbat Refugee Camp

An experimental art hive has been set up in Arbat Refugee Camp ( I like the name Arc in English for our art hive! A safe place). At the moment it is only for girls and women of the community, ranging from 6 years upwards. STEP Iraq is an NGO that works in the Sulimanie region of Kurdistan with some of the most vulnerable children.  STEP has been working with Syrian children within the ARC refugee camp in a Child Friendly Space setting since 2013.  I am an art-therapist who has arrived relatively recently, and my job if that of a consultant for the staff members who are doing psychosocial creative activities with the children and youth who come to our safe space.  As a trained art therapist, I obviously wanted to be able to practise art therapy; to use my skills to help certain children and youth express themselves through creative means, within a safe, professional and therapeutic context. This I have begun to do, but I realised very quickly that I wanted to create a safe context where I could invite bigger groups of different members of the community to participate in creative activities and to experience potential therapeutic benefits.  This is when I discovered the idea of 'art-hives'.  My hope is that this art-hive will benefit  the ARC community, in the short term, and perhaps inspire some of its members to one day open their own art-hive spaces in other parts of Iraq and Syria...to be kind, be human and be the change.....