TFTC Gardens is delighted to have started work at the Cumberland Juvenile Detention Center with the design and implementation of the first TFTC Garden. To be a TFTC Garden, the organization must include the structures recommended by the TFTC Gardens Team. These recommendations will help to promote mental wellbeing using resiliency strategies that we described earlier. The TFTC Gardens team has spent the last two years carrying out extensive mental health research including international networking, concept sharing, strategy development and creation of ideas for Juvenile Justice including providing support with grant applications.

Recently the TFTC Gardens team have been networking extensively in the Fayetteville area. They have discovered an incredible community who are supporting Juvenile Justice with the building phase of the garden. Reka Reyna, Outreach Co-ordinator, Steven A. Cohn Military Family Clinic, has done an outstanding job of organizing a group of volunteers from the local police departments, military groups, and veterans. We also have support of the Master Gardeners with Cape Fear Botanical Gardens and other local Fayetteville organizations.

Using generous public donations TFTC Gardens has funded a water feature and beautiful wall mural designed by Edie Cohn and painted by artists Edie Cohn and Jerdahn Campbell. Volunteers visited the detention center to help prep and prepare the wall for the mural. We are now excited to be moving forward to complete this project and then begin supporting another non-profit organization with the implementation of a specially designed TFTC Garden.

We look forward to hearing from you! We are always looking for volunteers to join the TFTC Gardens Team and generous donors who will help make our trauma-informed therapeutic community gardens possible. Community is everything.

Read more at Nami Wake County…

This is a mental health initiative designed to promote positive emotional well-being using indoor and outdoor spaces. These spaces will introduce trauma-focused care initiatives to encourage emotional recovery and the building of resiliency skills.  It is now known that environments whether indoor or outdoor will have an impact on our emotional well-being.

For example, can we expect young people in lock and key facilities to be able to improve social and emotional skills in a facility without a specially designed therapeutic space?  A TFTC Garden or indoor space is designed using resiliency strategies. Students can learn how to express themselves using color codes, pacing pathways, music, deep breathing, yoga, water features, and sensory plants – all to promote a positive new start.

Students and staff can work on resiliency strategies together. There can be shared healthy conversations about life in the garden. Above all, as described by a Juvenile in a Detention Center, “they will give me a chance to leave a message for others by leaving a plant or an artwork to let other new students know that there is hope.”

This is a step forward in social equity for at-risk populations – a space, where for the first time, deeper self-learning can take place. Resiliency skills will reduce the risk of suicide, improve mental well-being and provide a skill set to help reduce the risk of recidivism. We cannot expect young people to know what they don’t know. Our aim is that these spaces will provide a legacy of emotional expression and recovery.

“These emotional expression spaces can be specifically designed for both public and private use, in any setting and for any age group. We all need little things to help us with our emotional wellbeing.” Natasha Donnelly, PhD