Founder Gloria Simoneaux has recently been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to lecture and research at the University of Nairobi, Kenya for a year. She will move to Kenya in September 2008.
Mission
Harambee Arts: Let's Pull Together TM partners with African grassroots programs to train local caregivers to provide art programs for vulnerable children in an environment that fosters their sense of joy, creativity and exuberance. Through its arts programs, Harambee Arts strives to promote the well-being of homeless, orphaned and other neglected children, enhance the stability of their families and support systems, and develop their sense of self-worth and positive personal ethics by creating opportunities for children to help other children.
History
Gloria Simoneaux founded DrawBridge: An Arts Program for Homeless Children in 1989 and she served as Executive Director until December 31, 2007. Over the past ten years, she has been offering trainings in working with children in crisis in Europe and Africa. Since 2000, Ms. Simoneaux has made six trips to Africa where she set up an arts program for children affected by HIV/AIDS in Eritrea, worked with young members of the Samburu tribe in Northern Kenya (hosted by Ol Malo Trust), trained HIV positive community health care workers in Tanzania (hosted by REPSSI), worked with orphans and street children in Eastern Ghana and Zimbabwe, trained pre-school teachers and orphanage staff, as well as offering individual art therapy sessions to sexually abused orphans in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. She also taught expressive art and play therapy techniques at the University of Nairobi's Department of Psychology and at CONNECT, a family therapy institute in Zimbabwe.
In 2006, a collaboration between DrawBridge, the Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe was initiated to provide ongoing expressive art groups to pediatric oncology patients and other critical care patients. The program is directed by Masimba Hwati, the National Gallery’s artist-in-residence and supervised by Gloria Simoneaux. Over the years DrawBridge also established international partnerships with groups in Afghanistan, Palestine, India and Mexico. In October 2005, Ms. Simoneaux presented a workshop at the European Art Therapy Association Conference on Crete and she was invited to present at the International Association for Art, Creativity and Therapy Conference in Berlin in September 2006.
