The Biscayne Institutes

of Health and Living

Portrait of the Self as a Young Person is an artistic grant provided by the Miami-Dade Cultural Arts & Children’s Trust Youth Enrichment Grant.  This arts medicine program provides special needs students with therapeutic applications of visual arts interventions.  Over the course of eight months, the children exercised their creative energy by creating mandalas symbolizing issues of themselves and their family, self collages representing the past, present and future, as well as writing essays about how they have directly benefitted from this therapeutic arts program. The focus in the art therapy was not on teaching or increasing art skills per se, but to deepen the psychological understanding of the artist about themselves and their development through the use of art.

 

Kiwanis Gives Us a Lift!      In 2006, Kiwanis of Aventura received $2000 from the Kiwanis of Florida Foundation.  This grant went towards the purchase a lift for The Biscayne Institutes of Health & Living van that allowed children who are in wheelchairs to be transported to school, rehabilitation and community outings.

The Biscayne Institute is able to offer cost effective care with the help of various grants generously provided by different organizations.

 

Grants

Rappers for Peace is a musical program that is part of a grant provided by the Children’s Trust, which provides a non-violence curriculum over the course of a school year to “at risk” children and youth with disabilities, ages 6 through 21. Mr. Jimmie instructs the students of Biscayne Academy weekly on music instrumentation, writing instruction and song and beat development.  Classes included a weekly (1) one hour classroom program on nonviolence; (2) group therapy and social skills development; and (3) development of original music by the participants in their music classes, including “rap” and the “spoken word.”   The participants wrote music celebrating violence prevention, which they performed for peers and the community at the 2008 graduation ceremony.