For Kids
The Creative Healing Arts Program offers a series of artist-led workshops designed to foster community, healing, and freedom of cultural expression to refugees and immigrants who have survived forced displacement. Running from September 2026 through March 2027, the program will offer at least two free classes per month to 10-15 participants across media including pottery, watercolor, drawing, crocheting, knitting, dance and movement, community garden, and outdoor art projects. Local partners for this program include Clay Connections, Urban Art Co-op, the Spokane Potters Guild, Spokane Art Supply, the Corbin Art Center, the Belly Dance Academy, Vytal Movement, and Spokane Art School, along with a Gonzaga University student-led crocheting group. The program will build toward an exciting public exhibit of participant artwork at Spokane Public Libraries in March 2027. Creative Healing will offer professional spaces, equipment, and instruction, expanding the creative opportunities available to participants while strengthening their connections to Spokane’s broader arts community.
Creative Healing builds on four years of volunteer-led healing-arts sessions run by IRC Spokane’s team and is grounded in the leadership of resident refugee artists Shah Mahmood Hejran, Zekarias Woldegebriel, and Veeda Niaz, who will also serve as paid mentors and instructors throughout the program. Hejran, a Bachelor of Fine Arts and graduate of the Fine Art Institute of Kabul who resettled in Spokane as a refugee in 2022, and Niaz, a self-taught artist from Afghanistan, have both previously exhibited work at Gonzaga University’s Jundt Art Center through IRC’s Art-Vocacy events. SAGA funding will support instructor and mentor compensation, interpretation services, program supplies, and take-home “Art Kits” so participants can continue their creative practice at home.