Hello everyone,

I'm new here and I wanted to share a purpose letter I wrote about a project that I've been envisioning for a couple of years. The purpose letter is meant for a PhD program, but it encapsulates the inception of what I'm driven to do. Hope it makes sense. Sending Love and Joy!

Please share any thoughts or ideas :)

Ersellia Ferron Purpose Statement

Children's mental health is a growing concern that needs attention from all sectors—family, education, healthcare, and policy.  We need to be paying more in-depth attention to the rise in child suicide as well as isolation and bullying, and the ways in which these rates are propelled by white supremacy.  According to the National Institute of Mental Health, there has been an 8% annual increase in preteen suicide since 2008, disproportionately affecting female preteens over males; black preteens have the overall highest suicide rate, with the greatest increase being in Hispanic preteens.

Working at the Queens Child Advocacy Center these past two years as a forensic interviewer compelled me to find interventions and strategies that address some of the long-term concerns around the effects of PTSD in children. As an accomplished artist, I have demonstrated my ability to pick a topic, plan projects around it, secure adequate funding, and complete it at a professional level. Those in the know recognize that documentaries are among the hardest projects to produce, and I have shot and produced four, including a feature-length work on arranged marriage in Islamic India. Now that I am an experienced social worker cultivating a specialization in children’s mental health, I envision creating a summer program in which children could be invited to learn tools to recover or support their growth through arts, like dance or photography, yoga and meditation, and a range of therapeutic modalities. I know the groundbreaking effects that yoga and meditation have on regulating the nervous system, having studied for 12 years mediation and yogic trainings under a Buddhist Lama. I also know the positive and expending effects of arts and dance since I grew up being an artist with artist parents, dancing on stage and, later, becoming a visual artist. Those are the life experiences that brought me to social work.

I am motivated by a strong memory of the transition of growing up and being free to completely express myself through performance art, acting, multi-media and, eventually, documentary film. My concurrent study of the interior arts, the philosophy of mind expansion and self-regulating the nervous system, forced me to realize that I should transmit what I learned and integrate it into an innate approach to social work. As a social worker, I seek to provide a caring, safe holding space for my client’s rest and recovery. In my philosophy of practice, self-realization through meditative practices and the expressive arts, make up much of my training. Bell Hooks argued, in Teaching to Transgress (1994), that “if professors are wounded, damaged individuals, people who are not self-actualized, then they will seek asylum in the academy rather than seek to make the academy a place of challenge, dialectical interchange, and growth” (p. 165). Though I am a social worker and not a professor, I relate to this quotation because we cannot teach what we do not know, and my experiences of happiness and liberation, or post-traumatic growth, have been key to my professionalization. Now, I would like to develop an integrated therapeutic approach that can improve the lives of children.

While working at the QCAC, we were trained in the trauma model Child and Family Trauma Stress Intervention or CFTSI by Carrie Epstein. It was profoundly helpful in showing me the possibilities of alleviating the trauma and pain felt in a crisis. I want to continue working with Epstein and her team, because the possibilities of this modality offer life changing empowerment. I also attended an online session of the Yale Child Study Center Grand Rounds, and I was impressed with the professionalism and depth of work being done with families and children when the students presented their research. I aim to be equally clinically articulate about the work necessary to support families, and to find ways to truly provide a course of therapies that can help families recover together. I believe that often if one presents as an authentic person, children and families will feel more relaxed when dealing with challenging moments in their lives. But it involves having, oneself, the tools to help those families, and embarking on a rewarding, communal experience.

The didactic experience promised in the Advanced Clinical Social Work Fellowship  would provide me with the opportunity to develop the program I envision, one in which vulnerable children who have been abused can learn tools to thrive as adults. In the program, I wish to learn more about the human experience, involving  the cultural constructs and relation styles which effect the therapeutic dyad and society at large and ways to support family agency at the level of the systemic structures of the United States. I wish to continue the work of interrogating the ways in which resources and agency is unevenly distributed in accordance with the legacy of white supremacy organizing our institutions. Part of learning post-traumatic growth involves processing the cultural traumas of how we construct ourselves, the layers of cultural training we get at home, at school, and in the public sphere.  The didactic experience promised in the Advanced Clinical Social Work Fellowship would provide me with the opportunity to develop the program I envision, one in which our vulnerable children can learn tools to blossom in an already challenging world.