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Date: 12/28/2020
WESTERN MASS. – A nonprofit organization working with foster care families across the region and a local artist teamed up to come up with a coloring book, which will serve as a tool for families going through the foster and/or adoptive process.
All Our Kids Inc. (AOK) founder and President Marianna Litovich said she couldn’t remember how the project initially began. Sally Campbell Galmen, artist and professor of teacher education and curriculum students at UMass, said the project began over a series of conversations in passing years ago. “I think we talked about it in passing,” she said, laughing that they “both have a million children between us,” and very little time.
Soon, the ball was rolling on a coloring book to help foster and adoptive families and children navigate the difficult and oftentimes scary transition that comes with the process. Litovich said she’d always thought highly of Galmen’s work and knew there was room in the field for an interactive tool such as a coloring book. “I think that I’ve always really admired Sally’s work and how she’s able to blend art and other things of value, and political work,” Litovich said. “I just had the thought, we could do something that’s foster care related that has her work in it.”
While a coloring book is slightly outside of the scope of work All Our Kids does, Litovich said it still exists within their mission of work, which is supporting families of all kinds around Western Massachusetts. “Creating a coloring book is a little bit outside of the mission, which is supporting families so they can support children,” she said.
While there are a variety of tools available to help families through the fostering and/or adoptive process, Litovich said the coloring book was a unique tool that didn’t exist before the project. She said not only does a coloring book not exist, there was a very limited, if not non-existent, pool of interactive tools for which families could utilize.
“This tool doesn’t exist. There is nothing that is interactive with kids to see their families,” she said. However, the coloring book has the potential to become of the “unique powerful tools to give back to them.”
The project, Litovich said, was a blending of both hers and Galmen’s passions. “Sally does not do something she’s not passionate about. Sally is passionate about using art to create change, and I’m passionate about supporting fosters and adoptive families,” she said. “It was a beautiful blending of our passions.”
While there was passion behind the project, she said the experience and expertise between the two was also a significant factor in the project coming into fruition. “She’s a professor, I’m a clinical psychologist. It was a great merging of professional expertise and personal passions to support the community we really care about,” she said.
Galmen said she was excited to work on the book as it’s a genre she hadn’t worked on before, but had the potential to have such a significant impact. Initially, she said she struggled with how to approach the story, spending months creating a storyline that would reflect the experience and diverse nature of the story. “I spent months mocking up a story line and it didn’t work. It felt exclusionary,” she said. “AOK forces us to rethink our assumptions about who is doing the fostering and who is doing the caring.”
She said while there are not a lot of clear-cut, concise answers on representation, it’s clear that children who see themselves reflected and represented in media benefit from such representation. “Representation is huge. We don’t understand how representation works, but we do know if children see themselves reflected that goes a long way in normalizing their experiences and empowering them,” she said.
Litovich discussed the progress of the story and book coming together and said it took quite a collaboration to portray the authenticity of what foster and/or adoptive families and children go through. She discussed how the letter N had been portrayed by Galmen in the beginning of the process. She said it had been portrayed with exclamation points and excitement, however, this is often not the case for families and children who go through the foster and/or adoptive process.
“Sometimes new rooms are scary, sometimes new rooms are nothing something to be excited about. We worked to get the details right,” she said. This, she said, began with a community survey asking what scenarios “would speak to your families.” Both Litovich and Galmen said the coloring book was collaborative, not just between the pair, but also between the families and foster and adoptive community. Galmen said the work being done by AOK was “really radical and transformational.”
She called the book “genre asking work that needs to be done right now.” Additionally, she said the book was useful as it took the conversation from an adult perspective to a child’s point of view, including them in the conversation. “Something this book does is at a child’s access point. It’s supporting families by giving children something. In the research in childhood, something we continually try to do and don’t do very well is move conversations out of adults talking about children, to talking to children,” she said. “Marianna wrote the text, they fill themselves in and bring it to life”
This, she said, allows AOK to extend their mission to their most critical stakeholders: the children.
Litovich said while she was immediately focused on using this as a tool for the families in the immediate area, she’d started to think of what an essential tool it could be for those across the country going through the same thing. “I’ve only started realizing this could be a tool for a broader audience outside of Western Mass. My first mission is really to make sure this is available to families in the communities, make sure as many people get it as possible,” she said.
She said while she wanted families to have access to the book, the project also needed to be funded, and they were “seeking funding to distribute it.” She said, “I’m really just starting to think about how we can distribute this and disseminate it to not only to families, but for purchase,” she said.
Those in need of more information and/or interested in pre-ordering the coloring book can do so by visiting fosteringAOK.org/coloring.