TEAM > Our Founder "Ms Rae"
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ABOUT "Ms Rae."
Born in upstate NY in the 1960's and raised in a low income, multicultural, creative family, Teaching Artist "Ms. Rae" , at 16yrs old began developing the "C.H.A.I." LEARNING curriculum utilized today at her educational charity, ArtStudioWorld.org. Her family farm gave her a foundation in gardens, healthy eating, and caring for and training animals. She worked with Horses, Dogs, Cats, Rabbits, Birds and was blessed to have a natural connection to animals. Her parents were creative and cultivated her interests in the arts. Her organic interest was in using both the creative and holistic arts for her own healing and to teach important educational themes. Her passion to share these beneficial processes for learning came from her own disempowering experiences with public schools failing to teach to a students need for alternative solutions, important life skills and much needed multiple intelligence based learning. Due to family stress, poverty and dysfunctional challenges, at 14yrs old she was in foster care and spent 2yrs in juvenile centers. As a youth she saw the broken systems that even "good homes" were challenged with, and the traumas that start when we are young and in need of creative holistic approaches to learning and living. Ms Rae was a homeless street kid and drop out, until at 16yrs she began taking personal responsibility steps to heal. Through a variety of therapies addressing her learning disabilities, addictions and traumas, she began to gain self esteem and inspiration for living a positive and purposeful life. By deciding to take responsibility for her life's choices, she began to find ways to feel empowered and inspired to create her best life. She attended colleges with the intention of becoming an Art Teacher, so she could utilize educational platforms for sharing the multiple intelligences project based learning curriculums she discovered were helping her with her dyslexia learning disabilities. She did her own focus groups and shared these as lesson plans in summer camps she worked at. She found all the children gravitating to these creative empowering approaches to learning and healing. She started working at 14yrs and went full time to pay for colleges where she received her A.S. & B.F.A. in fine arts painting, graphic design and art integrated education studies. She later studied positive psychology, art therapy and integrative wellness. She had a goal of creating lessons that were meaningful, edutainment based for fun learning, and focused on healing through personal reflection. She integrated tools to support how to creatively and critically think, seek truth, find root causes and gain solutions for living purposeful, fun, balanced, successful and inspiring lives. Early on in her teaching career she sadly realized the politics of the public schools were not open to her creative-holistic approach to arts based empowerment learning programs. Her internships were in many types of school systems, but all deterred her from taking the traditional teacher route and she entered the corporate world of Ad Mar Com Pub PR, working decades in director positions at publishing, advertising, marketing and web development companies. This became a primary career focus, but her work with at-risk youth continued in homeless shelters, churches and low income communities and schools. Even when she could work full-time she volunteered as a teaching artist to help students in need and has continued to volunteer her time to mentor youth with life skills and creative learning. All her income generating corporate work and art education volunteering was put on hold when she became chronically ill from a toxic chemical exposure, after showing up as a first responder volunteer to help during a disaster incident in NYC in September 2001. By 2004 she was frequently bed-ridden from immune, lung, brain and neurological imbalances she suffered from the chemical exposure. She was considered permanently disabled and due to depression from chronic pain and the loss of her once healthy life, she began to apply art therapy to her life in a new way, to heal from the trauma of being disabled and having to surrender and find a new way to live a purposeful life. Through a group of teaching artists, in 2007, the charity she founded decades before was now named Art Studio World Inc, and received it 501c3 NPO status in December of 2008. Since then the organization has served an average of 600 youth per year with the CHAI LEARNING programs she created to focus on educational themes such as; CREATIVE CORE, VIDEO VOICES, AWESOME ANIMALS, EVERYTHING ENERGY, WELLNESS WARRIORS, FOREST FRIENDS and many others that use Creative-Holistic Art Integration learning. Everything Ms. Rae focuses on is out of pure need to find solutions for problems that are not working. So many adults were once children from all walks of life falling through cracks due to lack of creative and critical thinking tools and the life skills needed to excel and heal the traumas that leads to addiction, homelessness and other hardships in life. Art Studio World Inc., is 40+ years in the making to serve youth and families in communities and schools seeking to align for solutions that empower and inspire all of us to find our passion and healing. Ms. Rae is all about collaboration and partnerships based in integrity, and aligned in missions and visions to reach goals that help heal our world. Since 2010 Ms Rae has resided in NC to receive medical treatments for her disability and when she can she continues her volunteer work mentoring at-risk youth with empowerment tools. She originally created the Awesome Animals Pet Therapy programs in the 1990's but sadly she had to give up her pets due to her disability and extreme allergy's. Years after registering online for a "non-allergy" rescue pet, she was contacted and to her surprise the Velveteen Rex Rabbit was a non-allergy breed and became her new pet. With her childhood background in training dogs and horses she studied rabbit behaviors and began training her rabbits for pet therapy. Her research led her to studies of rabbits being used for PTSD discoveries and from this information and her intuitive connection with animals she created animal assisted mindful breath and stretch tools to help her in managing her PTSD symptoms. It turns out that Rabbits, as prey animals, are in PTSD mode 24/7 and the same breathing techniques used to manage PTSD in a human also positively affect the rabbits. As her time with the rabbits became a healing practice, she began sharing this process with others and since 2019 has trained and supported others with disabilities, including veterans and youth dealing with trauma. It is her goal to make the Awesome Animals and Rabbit Romp programs at ArtStudioWorld.org, available to all who are in need of healing solutions. Although she currently spends 30hrs a week in medical treatments to manage her symptoms, she finds time to mentor and respond to others who are healing and want to share their experiences, solutions and creative skills for beneficial purposes. Ms Rae can be contacted through the team at [email protected] |
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
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