Our lives are shaped by the stories we hear and our success depends on the stories we’re told. The stories we hear can empower, inspire and transform our lives. When we tell stories, we build connections and facilitate healing within ourselves.
At My Life Is Art, we use storytelling for social-emotional learning and are excited to announce that we’ll be taking our monthly storytelling series online. We invite you to join us where we welcome members of the My Life Is Art community, who’ll share their unique and thought-provoking stories, and take questions from one another and participants.
Time: Sunday July 26 at 2pm Eastern time
Duration: Approximately 90 minutes
* During the event, we will feature a live Q & A - feel free to submit questions beforehand to tania@mylifeisart.org
Our speakers:
Delane Cooper
Delane is a Dreamatizer and Artist who weaves stories into her wearable works of art. As the recipient of those who gave to Delane along her journey, she has a passion of giving back to her community.
Being a person of experience of child sexual abuse, Delane wrote her memoir Letters to Eli, My Story the Story of Many and launched a series of talks called Breaking the Silence which led her and her colleagues to be founders of the Lotus Hero Project. Art has been an important vehicle for Delane to heal from her trauma and as such is a board member of the Toronto Art Therapy Institute in Canada. Her vision for the Lotus Hero Project is to inspire and empower children and adults to be their own hero through art so individuals develop skills to express their experience through creative expression so that their quality of life is improved and that they may be active contributors to society and living their hero’s journey.
Through DELANE, she has designed custom jewellery pieces for in collaboration for organizations such as Planeterra, the Canadian Women’s Foundation, People of the Water, Dogs of the Ganges and The National Ballet of Canada Turnout. After serving as President of the Metal Arts Guild of Canada and Executive Director of the Toronto International Jewellery Festival, she challenged herself in how she could give back in a meaningful way specifically to children and adults who are people of experience of child sexual abuse (CSA).
www.lotusheroproject.org/letters-to-eli/
Charles Perroud
Charles Perroud works as a Spiritual Care and Guidance, and Community Involvement Leader in 50+ different elementary schools in the Trois-Rivieres area in Quebec. Through dozens of workshops and projects, he works mainly on opening the minds of the students and developing their critical thinking.
He started out his career as a biochemist and worked for three years in the biopharmaceutical industry in New Zealand and in Montreal before teaching English as a second language in South Korea and Brazil for three years. Throughout that span, he has been heavily active for the past 20 years within several Amnesty International sections, for whom he was employed between 2007 and 2011 as Activism Coordinator. Currently, he has been Death Penalty Abolition Coordinator for the past 12+ years.
A father of two boys, he went through the tragic death of his youngest son in 2016 after a lengthy battle to a neurological degenerative disease, Since, through the My Life Is Art approach to life, he has turned his life 360 and shared the practice on a daily basis with friends and colleagues alike. In June 2020, he co-founded Ukiyo Meditation, which provides the MLIA approach in French while also eventually provide end-of-life individual care and grieving rituals to families.