Invitation to Somatic Experiencing Practitioners
Dear Bay Area SEPs,
This is a note from Deborah Boyar, Patricia Meadows, and Lee Wylie.
During the past year, we have been offering SE education and sessions to selected staff and program participants at COTS, a remarkable homeless shelter in Petaluma. The staff and Executive Director have welcomed us most fully, and made an ongoing commitment to integrate SE into more and more of their offerings. It is an incredibly progressive place that must be seen and experienced to be believed. We hope you'll get a feel for some
of it by reading the material below (there are also some short videos if you like).
The SE work has been so warmly and gratefully received that we now want to broaden our offering. We have just created a pilot program to build a bridge for SEPs to join us in service at COTS, and take part in this deeply satisfying opportunity.
Once we’ve completed and refined our pilot program, we’ll invite interested SEPs to volunteer to offer sessions at our COTS SE clinic, which we anticipate will be up and running mid-summer 2007.
We hope that many of our local SEP colleagues will take advantage of this opportunity to volunteer their skills in this enormously gratifying setting. We envision the SE clinic expanding and continuing to grow over time, as more and more SEPs become involved.
If you would like to help serve a population in desperate need, who are very eager to heal and restore balance to their lives, we encourage you to investigate this wonderful opportunity.
We’ll keep you posted as our SE clinic develops, and hope you will feel inspired to participate with us later this summer. We’ll go so far as to say that you won't regret it!
To express your interest, please contact Patricia Meadows at pmeadowsca@aol.com or 415.883.8321.
Warmly,
Deborah Boyar, Patricia Meadows, and Lee Wylie
PS If you'd like to keep reading below, you'll find some good information about COTS.
Click here for an article about this project in the FHE Spring 2007 newsletter.
Key Points about COTS
Homeless people often have suffered crushing trauma and neglect, and are survivors of situations that would have killed many people. This four minute video shows some ways people become homeless.
We believe that homeless people are worth helping, and actually can be helped.
Not everyone believes that homeless people are worth helping. We do. Moreover, we know how to help them. This seven minute video gives a few examples.
We help a lot of people.
Here are a few key statistics. In a year, COTS:
Provides emergency shelter and housing to about 1,000 children and adults
Gives licensed childcare to almost 200 children
Provides about 100,000 meals
Delivers almost 500,000 pounds of food to needy seniors and families.
Our programs are innovative.
Innovation helps our programs to be effective. For instance, Kids First applies state of the art research about Adverse Childhood Experiences and support such as Somatic Experiencing to help homeless parents build a strong foundation for their children. At Home Within helps homeless adults find stability and calmness by teaching them meditation and restorative practices (click here for 12 minute video).
We are committed to excellence in our work.
We are passionate about helping homeless people, and our programs are demonstrably effective. For example, in a recent very competitive evaluation, our housing and family programs were ranked third in the state of California, out of 103 applicants. In this same evaluation, our programs for adults without children ranked seventh in the process. We also have received numerous awards recognizing the excellence of our programs. Other agencies frequently consult us to learn more about our programs.
If you are interested in volunteering at COTS as an SEP, please email Deborah Boyar.
For more information on COTS, please see our main website.
Thanks for your time and interest!
Your friends at COTS