As part of our Community-Based Theatre class, I collaborated with peers Rachel Hutzenbiler and Zoe Tyler in partnership with Catholic Charities to create an educational storybook and curriculum to facilitate the process of discussing the foster care licensing process with Arizona kinship foster families. We began with broad partnership goals of developing effective connections, shared values, and experiences of happiness delight, and on top of these we added three primary outcomes of interest for Catholic Charities: (1) making creative communications for families to learn about kinship foster care, (2) developing a plan for how to disseminate this new knowledge, and (3) forming structures to reduce shame and fear among caregivers and children.

Throughout our collaboration, we structured weekly check-in meetings where ASU students met with four members of the Catholic Charities team to gather information, present updates and creative choice points, and discuss possibilities for how the project might evolve in the coming week. After using research and role-playing to distill the key elements of the licensing process, Zoe, Rachel, and I each wrote the first-person story and created corresponding images for a different fictional kinship foster child. Catholic Charities weighed in on the progress of the book regularly throughout, and we workshopped it with people unfamiliar with the process. As a finishing touch, we created a voice-over version of the book and wrote series of activities that caseworkers can pair with the material. This project solidified my interest in working in community partnerships to facilitate and execute creative projects.