Hope & Healing with Children’s Center

Al Vecchione is the founder and clinical director of The Francis Foundation, a private non-profit in Vermont that serves people with extremely challenging behavior. He’s also founder of the Francis Foundation Learning Center and co-founder of the Vermont Crisis Intervention Network. He’s been a trainer for Children’s Center, teaching how the body is the battleground where struggles around trauma, mental health and developmental disabilities are played out. In this engaging interview, Al shares with Children’s center Executive Director Matthew Butte some of the insights and lessons he’s learned over a lifetime helping people.

Michelle Snyder is the executive director of Soul Shop, an organization that conducts trainings and workshops aimed at suicide prevention for faith community leaders. Michelle has been part of educational residencies all over the country, either conducting them herself or dispatching trained facilitators to address the growing problem of suicide and the ongoing challenge of a society that would often prefer to look the other way. In this honest and moving conversation with Matthew Butte, executive director of Children’s Center, Michelle talks about the hope that she has and the hard work still to be done.

In this episode, instead of talking to some of our favorite people around the country, we stay home and talk with some brilliant bringers of hope and healing right here at Children’s Center. Ashley Hernandez and Sarah Stahl are two of our in-house therapists doing amazing work with young clients. They tell Matthew Butte, executive director of Children’s Center, about the challenges and deep, profound rewards of working with the people who come to Children’s Center for help. Therapy can be hard work for client and clinician alike but Sarah and Ashley bring intelligence, heart, and creativity to the situation and can help make it a positive experience for everyone involved.

Maggie Smith is one of the most popular and acclaimed American poets, with numerous poetry anthologies and a memoir to her name. Maggie is perhaps best known for Good Bones, a poem that has been read on network television, at Lincoln Center by Meryl Streep, and in a thousand memes distributed all over the internet. She sits down for an interview about mental health and the written word with Children’s Center Executive Director Matthew Butte, who has long been inspired by the power and potential of poetry.

John Moe is a podcaster and speaker based in Saint Paul, Minnesota and the author of The Hilarious World of Depression. He believes that open and honest conversation about mental illness is one of the best paths available to removing the stigma around the issue and helping society find some healing. He also believes that humor definitely has a place in discussions of mental health. In this interview with Children’s Center’s Matthew Butte, John tells of his own journey and what he’s learned about helping himself and helping others.