Constellations

Welcome to Constellations!

Hello and welcome to Constellations, the quarterly newsletter from your therapist and youth worker friends at Constellation Collective! We are so excited to share this space with you to keep you abreast of our work, share helpful resources, and find new ways to keep expanding all of our personal and professional constellations.

We are proud of the gravitational waves our Collective members have been creating since our launch last Summer:

• Lizzy Appleby was featured at TedX Wilmette’s April showcase with her talk Say What’s True: Everyday Bravery Can Change the World. If you are interested in connecting further with Lizzy around her TedX talk, please join us at her January 30th Salon at the Wilmette Theatre in downtown Wilmette.

• Nat Duran was invited to contribute to Supporting LGBTQ+ Youth in Afterschool Programs and Opposing Anti-LGBTQ+ Attacks, a briefing paper that was a product of How Kids Learn Foundation and Temescal Associates. You can find Nat’s contributions throughout the above briefing paper, and in the subsequent blog posts that highlight some of their responses (linked here and here).

• Our team is growing! We are so excited to be taking on our first clinical staff member and can’t wait to to introduce you to her in our next issue and website! Particularly because this means we will soon have openings for individual therapy, including sliding scale options beyond our standing acceptance of BCBS PPO and Aetna PPO.

And if you’re looking for more opportunities to connect with us, you can find us next weekend at the Legal, Educational, and Mental Health Rights for LGBTQ+ Youth: A Symposium and Resource Fair hosted by Matt Cohen & Associates at Loyola School of Law. Please make sure to share with any youth and/or families who may benefit from the resources and learning that will occur there and stop by our resource table to say hi!

We are currently recruiting for our second official Youth Worker Coaching Community (YWCC)! Coaching Communities are small groups of 6-8 professionals who meet monthly for 6 months for continued learning and mutual support. Each session includes structured learning provided by our facilitators, as well as time for participants to share current professional challenges and receive feedback from other members. If the YWCC sounds like a great learning opportunity for you or someone you know, applications for our next cohort are live now! Sessions will occur 3:30-5:00 pm CT the third Monday of every month, beginning on November 20; other sessions will occur on: December 18, January 15, February 19, March 18, and April 15.

We are also super excited to announce that we are “re-launching” our podcast! Back before Constellation Collective was a sparkle in anyone’s eye, Nat and Lizzy began a youth work focused podcast, The Third Space. We’re lucky to have brought this work of love into our new professional endeavor and will have new episodes for all of you stars by the end of next month. In the meantime, go check out our old episodes - which have just been added to our website - and keep a look out for exciting new podcast news to come!