Mel Laro, Team Leader and Stephanie Stokes
Meli Women’s and Children’s Group is a team of 10 who work closely together in complex family situations. They provide direct support to women and children experiencing family violence.
Having experienced several recent staff changes, Mel and Steph wanted to develop a resource that would bring the team together with a shared vision and understanding of their values.
‘We wanted to create a flexible resource that gave us all a sense of ownership and a sense of belonging,’ they explained. ‘And we wanted to acknowledge and normalise some of our struggles and build our resilience.’
For the team to perform well at their jobs, enjoy what they do, and be resilient, Steph and Mel needed to create something that would encourage team cohesion, would be fun and creative, and could be used across a variety of contexts. It was a big ask, but with their team’s help, a pack of photo language cards called ‘Bounce’ was born.
Knowing that studies have found being able to identify and articulate a range of emotions helps foster resilience, Mel and Steph invited team members to:
- take a series of photos representing 5 different emotions
- submit their photos, which were then laminated and collated into a set of up to 50 cards
- describe the emotion they saw captured in each photo with the team
- use the unlabelled cards (so people can decide what emotion the card represents for them) as prompts in conversations to help identify and convey feelings.
As team members reflected on the images they’d chosen, they found it not only helped them to identify and navigate their struggles, but also emphasised their strengths and sense of connectedness. As a result, the process of co-creating the cards was as important as the final product.
Steph explained, ‘We discovered along the way a unique and wonderful perspective of our external world which reflected our internal world, of who we are and how we feel.’
Once completed, the cards were used during reflective practice, group supervision and in team meetings. They were also used throughout the day to help the team identify and share with each other how they were feeling. And as a bonus, the cards were used with service users.
As new workers join the team, they will be invited to share their own set of five cards, capturing emotions, so they too can feel a sense of ownership and belonging.
To find out more about setting up and using ‘Bounce cards for building resilience’, please watch this short video.
Updated