Crayons And Stuff

At Crayons and Stuff, we value and seek to give space to the creations, voices, and perspectives of people with lived experiences of systemic oppression, trauma, and significant live distress. This includes but is not limited to people with formal diagnoses and other interactions with the mental health system. We know that other personal experiences, such as racism, sexual/gender identity, family violence, and poverty, can also contribute a lot to our understanding of trauma and mental health. Our Founder and Director, Dr. Alisoun Neville, draws on her own lived experience of psychosocial disability and aims to do so more publicly in the Crayons and Stuff business and practice model. For example, she has shared her story to student therapists to illustrate that trauma is created within a social context, and that the impacts of trauma may look the same as any of the diagnoses used in the medical model. Because our own stories and experiences matter, she wants to see more professional health practitioners step with confidence into public self-disclosure. Alisoun is also a well-established practicing therapist, to which she brings almost 20 years of experience working in health and community services more broadly. She loves working multi-modally, across all types of materials, and has a passion for poetry and fiction as forms of therapeutic expression. Sally Dalton has joined Alisoun as the first new member of our therapeutic team. Sally is an Expressive Arts Therapist and brings to this a gentle energy and deep love of the materials she uses in her work. Sally is a practicing artist, with exhibitions in Australia and the U.S, and has a background in, and passion for, community arts. Our Consulting Services use traditional consulting and facilitation skills to support the Crayons and Stuff vision, with the capacity to draw on our specialist training and creative toolkit for "doing workstuff differently using creative arts".