December 2024 | Update 4: TSC Model Affirmed by Oldest Foster Care Organization in the US
Late last year I spoke with Sharmeela Mediratta, the Chief Wellness & Environmental Design Officer at Graham Windham in New York. Graham Windham is the oldest foster care organization in the US – founded in 1806 by Eliza Hamilton. Yes, that Eliza … you know “Angelica! (Work, work!) ELIZA! And Peggy! (Work, work!)” … Alexander’s wife!
Given that Sharmeela has “Chief” in her title and the fact that she’s the colleague of a friend of a friend of mine, I thought she’d give me about 7.5 minutes of her time … if I was lucky. But heck, I’ll talk to anyone who will talk to me about TSC! Well, after more than an hour on the phone we hung up only because Sharmeela couldn’t miss another one of her meetings … she had already pushed off one meeting while we were talking! God knew that I needed a little bit of gas in my tank on that very day … and He more than filled it with this call.
“TSC Model” & “Research”
First off, given what Sharmeela learned from the TSC website prior to our call and what I had shared with her on the phone, she was a bit confused by the fact that prior to launching TSC I didn’t have any background in foster care. She was also perplexed by the fact that I hadn’t worked with someone to do the research necessary to come up with the “TSC Model” (i.e., TSC Approach and the TSC Core Elements). Frankly, I didn’t realize we had a “model” until she mentioned it. When I told her that it was just little ol’ me and Google, she just sat and pondered a bit in silence.
I say all this not to pat myself on the back, but to say … I agree. There’s no reason that we should have been able to come up the vision for TSC and then back it up with data and our “model.” No reason, but God! So, not only was I really encouraged by her feedback, but her feedback also affirmed that TSC was God’s vision and God’s alone! So cool … so God!
Dosage of Nature
Another incredible affirmation & encouragement came from this call. Sharmeela had just spoken with a colleague of hers from Oxford (you know, that highfalutin university across the pond) about some research she was doing. Her Oxford colleague was researching the “dosage of nature” … like the “dosage of medicine.” In other words, how to best “administer nature” to optimally address the effects that trauma has had on children in foster care.
One of the challenges Mz. Oxford was having was finding a way … and a place … to “dose nature” as you would medicine: 1. a certain type of interaction with nature (i.e., the medicine); 2. given in appropriate amounts (i.e., dosage); 3. consistently over a certain amount of time (e.g., frequency and timeframe).
The primary ways she had found nature being “dosed” were either nominal interactions (e.g., light, unintentional, and inconsistent) or a big “bolus” of time outside (e.g., summer camps or weekend visits to the country, etc.). Unfortunately, many of these interactions with nature weren’t necessarily very purposeful, and almost all were not consistent over any period of time … which is clearly suboptimal. Good, but not the best.
Sharmeela saw the “TSC Model” as the perfect means to prove the hypothesis that we all know in our guts to be true – that spending consistent & intentional time (structured & unstructured) outside in nature for extended periods of time is healing on so many levels and in so many ways.
Sharmeela closed by saying that once we have a TSC Hub site up & running, that she would love to reconnect and then connect us with Mz. Oxford. Or, at the very least, she recommended that we partner with a local university to do similar research. She also offered to be on the TSC Board if I thought that would be helpful (duh!) … again, once we were up & running. Isn’t that incredible … who would have thunk?!?
So, please, continue to pray to that end … that one day we’ll have a piece of property of our own to serve as a TSC Hub site. Where not only real healing & growth can happen for these precious children, but where specific research could be done to back it up so that these types of outdoor spaces and experiences for foster children (and others who have been affected by foster care or some other type of trauma) will become the norm and deemed as critical to their healing vs. the exception and a nice-to-have!