Kintsugi Hope Youth Wellbeing Group review by Claire Hughes, youth worker and leader at Gateway Church, Caerphilly.

 

We are a small church who are passionate about sharing the love of Christ with our local community. Over the last two years we have become increasingly aware of the growing mental health concerns, especially among young people.  In response to this we have been exploring and trialling the Kintsugi Hope Youth Wellbeing Groups with the young people that we already have contact with through our youth work. We have recently run a group for boys and a separate one for girls, all between the ages of 14 and 18.

The Kintsugi Hope groups explore the topics of honesty, anxiety, depression, anger, perfectionism and shame through watching videos, having group discussions, learning coping techniques and partaking in reflective activities. The groups derive their name from a Japanese art of repairing broken pots with golden glue, and therefore making beauty out of the cracks.  

It is our desire to use this tool to firstly help young people to understand how they respond to life and provide them with tools to better cope with what life throws at them, along with giving them a safe place to explore how to positively move forward from situations that have left them scarred. This includes signposting youth that we feel need more professional help with issues that are brought up.

The youth version of Kintsugi Hope is aimed at comprehensive/secondary school aged youth (11-18 years old), although it could easily be adapted for young adults.  To run Kintsugi Hope groups you will need to become a partner church with Kintsugi Hope, they will then provide training for all the youth leaders ahead of running any groups. Once trained you will get access to a range of material for each of the weeks which you can select and tailor to your context along with a Facebook forum to connect and discuss with other youth leaders running groups around the country.

From our experience we loved the groups and felt the resource worked really well.  The youth found the topics and discussions engaging and particularly enjoyed repairing their own bowls in the final week.  We particularly liked that instead of providing a formal meeting plan, Kintsugi Hope provide a variety of activities and videos so that the resource can be tailored to each unique setting.  However as a result this did require more preparation time for each of the weeks.  If you run this for younger youth some of the videos were a bit more tailored towards older youth, although the Kintsugi team are working at updating the videos available.

We definitely plan to use it again, in fact we have another group starting next week. Because we only used about 40% of the material provided each week, we will revisit all of the material to make sure that we are using the most appropriate for that particular group, as every group is different.

Although we have run the groups in a church youth context, we feel it is suitable and plan to offer it to both church and community groups.  We also plan to offer the course in the local schools to help the young people process this extended lock down period. The groups can be run both online and in person, however in our context we found that the youth engaged more in person and we will not run any in the schools until we can do so in person.

More details of the resource can be found at https://www.kintsugihope.com/youth.

The Kintsugi Hope Wellbeing Group material doesn’t have a cost, but to access it you will need to become a partner church including giving a monthly donation to the charity.