The Family Institute for Creative Well-Being is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2001 based on lived experience and research with families who live with these health conditions.

Guiding Principles in Achieving the Mission:

• Assist families in building their strengths and resiliency.
• Increase families' abilities to manage chaos and uncertainties.
• Validate experience and increase self-understanding.
• Find new meaning through improved understanding of experience.
• Strengthen family relationships through heightened awareness of individual experience.
• Enhance self-esteem and family identity.
• Improve vision of possibilities found in creativity and spontaneity.
• Increase effectiveness in communicating needs to health, education, and service providers.
• Improve sense of connectedness to community.
• Heighten sense of personal value to self, family and community.
• Improve providers (health, education, and social service) understanding of the family experience and personal response to these families' situations.
• Research the role and impact of creative arts in family well-being.

Our Vision is to build awareness and understanding that exercise for the soul is achieved through therapeutic use of the creative arts and is as critical to emotional, social and spiritual health as exercise for the body is to physical health. 

When families hurt it is hard to maintain balance and meet the special health needs of their children.

Our vision is to provide families with the healing tools of creative expression that are needed in order to address the stressors and challenges that accompany disability and chronic illness.

When children feel abnormal or like they stick out like a sore thumb (such as the bald head that shouts cancer or the wheelchair that yells disability) they need a way to express this experience and to better understand their feelings. 

Our vision is to provide poetry therapy and creative arts programs that allow children and their families to express their thoughts and feelings in living with their disabilities or chronic illnesses. 

When professionals work with families who live with extraordinary experiences they need ways to better understand the families they serve.

Our vision is to train the professionals in the use of reflective practice for more filling and effective work and to better understand and recognize the role of stress in these families' lives and why this must be addressed in order to improve health outcomes.