Touch A Life is creating Art Centers around the world to bring healing to children who have been exploited.
Touch A Life Art Centers
CONNOR
CREATIVE ART
CENTER in
Ghana
Selah Art
Center in
Cambodia
Lilly’s Art
Center in
Cambodia
OUR Art Healing STORY
Touch A Life has surpassed a huge milestone with 15 years under our belt as a non-profit organization. Collaborating with like-minded partners, we have been able to creatively design spaces and programs that provide healing for children who have been exploited by slavery and child labor. On several occasions we have asked the children in our Ghana program, “What is your favorite building at the Care Center?” Unanimously they always say in a loud exaggerated voice, “The ART CENTER!”
Connor Creative Art Center is a therapeutic space located on the property of the Touch A Life Care Center. It is a place where the Touch A Life children can express their emotions in a creative and noninvasive way. Led by our Art Director, Kwame Ayensu, the children engage in therapeutic art practices to expand and enrich their world view.
The idea for Connor Creative Art Center came together with the help of Kim Lewis Designs and the team from Art Feeds. Kim’s design of a building shaped as Legos was inspired by the life of Connor Deal, who died at the age of 12 and loved making art, scripting movies, building with Legos, writing stories, and drawing.
The Art Center on our Care Center campus in Ghana has been, and continues to be, a place of healing. We are so grateful for this custom facility that caters to the specific needs of the children we serve. Our team has seen the darkness of child exploitation turned into light-filled artwork, and we didn’t want these life-changing transformations to end in Ghana. We have been dreaming of building art centers all over the world, and because of our incredible supporters, that dream is becoming reality.
We are partnering with carefully vetted organizations who are well-established – they need to have boots on the ground and skin in the game. The two Touch A Life Art Centers to be completed after Connor Creative Art Center are now a part of Rapha House campuses in Cambodia. Rapha House exists to love, rescue, and heal children who have been rescued from trafficking and sexual exploitation. This amazing organization was founded in 2003, and in early 2016 Kim Lewis once again joined the Touch A Life team to transform two existing spaces into Art Centers. In Battambang, Cambodia, Selah Art Center was once a dilapidated house boat. In Siem Reap, Lilly’s Art Center was created out of an empty cottage.
Whether in Ghana, Cambodia, or wherever the next Art Center will be, the Touch A Life Art Healing program seeks to bring restoration and renewal to children who have had a piece of their childhood stolen by slavery and exploitation. Art Healing brings freedom.