The Lasting Impact of Social Therapeutic Group Work/Play

18 Jul The Lasting Impact of Social Therapeutic Group Work/Play

Desire Wandan was a 16-year-old high school student in 2005. His school, Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn NY, is located in a mostly poor Caribbean immigrant neighborhood of Flatbush.

Barbara Silverman was the school social worker at Erasmus. An experienced social therapist with a background that included working with teens, Barbara started a teen group during the school’s lunch hours. The few students who initially came helped to build it and came up with the name “Let’s Talk About It”—because they could come and talk about—anything. These lunch gatherings continued for 15 years, ending in 2009. It gave hundreds of young people, including Desire, the opportunity to develop emotionally and socially through building their group.

Since then, Barbara has continued to create developmental social therapeutic learning environments including“Developing Across Borders.” These weekly, Zoom-enabled group-building coaching groups, led by Barbara and others, reflect and create with the cultural and political diversity of their members from many nations.

Since his “Let’s Talk About It,” experience, Desire has made a career as a producer, dancer, teaching artist, videographer, documentarian and content creator. He is passionate about hip-hop culture, and performs at NYC public schools, hospitals, shelters, museums, and festivals. For the past few years, he’s also been the Institute’s media and tech producer, and in January 2021, he helped launch and run the East Side Institute’s “All Power to the Developing” podcast. The series features activists, artists, educators, youth workers and others sharing their work of bringing development and growth to individuals and communities in different parts of the world

Recently, Desire and Barbara teamed up to bring together some alumni of “Let’s Talk About It” as guests on two “All Power…” episodes (Episodes 25 & 26). The lunch time drop-in group had a strong and lasting impact on Desire and he wanted to hear from others how they remembered it and used it over the ensuing 15 to 30 years.

I invite you to listen to these conversations. If you do, you’ll learn what an urban high school in the US is like. I think you’ll learn how profoundly important it is for young people to be heard. I think you’ll learn how important it is for them to not be told what to talk about and what to think. I think you’ll learn something about the social therapeutic group building process in a traditional (and extremely coercive) institution. I think you’ll learn what’s lasted for them all these years, especially when it comes to relationships, mutual respect, and support.