Healing Hearts Research Paper

Focus on Refugees
• No, refugees do not use Healing Hearts.
• Yes, tremendously so! Healing Hearts is all about sorting through the big feelings of leaving your home, losing your loved ones, and being in a new place. Refugees feel all of these and more, because they are also adjusting to a new culture. This must bring up difficult feelings, which can be upsetting and confusing. Healing Hearts could help them sift through these and find valuable ways to deal with these feelings. Healing Hearts also helps a verity of ages, the minimum age being seven, and there not being a maximum age. This means that most refugees who understand what has happened to them would be able to benefit from Healing Hearts.
• Yes, I think Healing Hearts would be
I’ve been apart of Healing Hearts for a little over a year now, and it has become such an important part of my week. I love working with the kids and the other volunteers, everyone is usually in such high spirits even on the tough nights. The confusion between love and pain that these kids feel and then ultimately share with us, brings a desire to help and support these young minds as they fight for clarity in their lives. I wouldn’t trade being their support system for anything in the world.
• Yes, Healing Hearts helps the foster children immensely. Once that rapport is built the children crave an escape from their feeling. Healing Hearts becomes the outlet with likeminded people that share the same situation as the kids. Healing Hearts creates a community that the kids can rely on. For the most part Healing Hearts lives up to its expectations. It falls short when you look at the teen group, and how it has diminished over the years, because no one showed up to it. Although Healing Hearts is court mandated, it is left up to the foster parents to get the kids there. This can be difficult if the foster parents have a lot of kids, or kids from different agencies. This complicates things because they can be torn between driving to one agency to another. There are also just some foster parents who don’t see it necessary for the kids or they see it as an inconvenience.
This way everyone sees how much work is truly put into making Healing Hearts great and it exposes the others to how to manage or keep the program running after Julie leaves. This would also increase the bond among volunteers creating a tighter community for the kids to be apart of.
• The staff at Healing Hearts is amazing they are all retired social workers, or currently social workers that take time out of their day to stay after work and provide this opportunity to foster kids. One woman even drives from Virginia Beach to Healing Hearts. They are all trained in social work, and know the inner workings of the system. A few even work for the agencies that some of the kids are from so they have an insiders view on the kids case, which can help us alter the activities in a way that will maximize the kids