“…can we just sit and paint our feelings all day?”

Each year, MENTOR, a national mentoring nonprofit, hosts the National Mentoring Summit. Programs around the country gather to learn from diversity, equity, and inclusion-driven plenaries and share insights through workshops. This year, the Eye to Eye National Mentoring Program team applied to lead a workshop on designing Mentoring opportunities for neurodiverse youth and young adults. Naturally, as two former Mentors and two-thirds of a national mentoring program, Associate Director Carly Priest and I knew we had to be a part of this convening! 

 We were overjoyed when our workshop, Cultivating Belonging for ND Youth and Young Adults through Art Based Mentoring was accepted as part of this year’s workshop offerings!  Our 90-minute session centered on one of the near-peer mentoring program’s art projects (of course) but started out with detailed research on the need for belonging by Erik Carter and thought-provoking questions for our audience on where they might increase opportunities for belonging in their programs specifically to reach neurodivergent youth and young adults. 

Centering belonging is not only an important aspect of our work with ND youth and young adults, but a personal commitment from myself and Carly. As adults who learn differently, we have firsthand experience in environments that did not amplify structures of inclusion and peer-to-peer community in their design to reach neurodiverse learners and just how vivifying it can be to finally feel seen. This is why all three members of our Near-Peer Mentoring Program team at Eye to Eye feel a strong dedication to designing and supporting a program that, for at least an hour a week, prioritizes participants in Eye to Eye’s program to feel that they are seen, heard, valued, and connected in community.  

The project we chose to include in this workshop– the My Emotions Gallery Project– emphasizes the connection between art-based activities and ND students’ belonging in social and academic settings. This Art Project is one that our Mentoring Chapters completed this program year and was designed by the ND lead of the Mentoring Program team. For this art project, emotional regulation is the competency in focus. In the typical Art Room, Mentors and Mentees discuss experiences of emotional dysregulation and emotional flooding (being overcome with emotions that can be hard to identify) as a common and often isolating experience for ND people. Using conversation cards to guide discussions of what it means to deregulate and the social effects of feeling misunderstood, participants explore strategies to regulate their emotions in healthy ways. Mentees practice naming multiple emotions associated with strong feelings using our Mentee Design Book resource, an emotions wheel, as they recall and discuss recent experiences feeling the emotions of anger, anxiousness, and joy. While they discuss, participants create mini watercolor portraits of each emotion, how the emotion feels when they are overwhelmed, and find the words to describe what else they felt. At the end of the project, participants assemble their mini watercolor paintings into a gallery labeled with the primary and secondary emotions they experienced the last time they felt dysregulated or out of control, experiencing anger, anxiousness, and joy. Our workshop participants eagerly jumped into the Art Room experience, and the process of painting and discussion proved cathartic for many— with one person exclaiming, “Ugh, this is great! Can we just paint our emotions all day?”. 

While the highlight of the conference for Carly and I was the ability to present our workshop, we each visited other sessions that we found interesting and beneficial to the growth and enrichment of our own program. She and I occasionally took the same session- one especially memorable one being Connect to Greatness’ Nurturing Connection, Belonging, and Trust for Mentoring Black Boys– a wonderful insight into how to ensure Black boys feel safe, listened to, encouraged, and that the mentoring spaces we design are spaces that promote their authentic belonging and trust. 

While other sessions may have had different taglines and focused on other topics, each stressed the importance of belonging for young people and focused on the importance of incorporating youth and young adult voices in designing community-led programs. As carriers of that flag ourselves, it felt powerful and energizing to see our organization’s mission, vision, and goals in good company– and so many industry leaders committed to the youth and young adults we collectively serve!