Planning our Path Forward
What is the problem?
The Waitlist Gap: The ‘wait-gap’ is a space between when a person reaches out for help in psychological distress and when that care service is available to them. This is evident on all levels of care from suicide emergency services and withdrawal units up to in-patient, long-term, or group therapy programs to having access to doctors, nurses, and quality medical care to no trained staff in hospital, clinical, and police intervention settings.
Mission: Firefly is here to connect professional and complimentary psychiatric health and wellness resources to each other and to the people who need them. Our ambition is to help close the waitlist gap by creating a larger network and pooling resources. Through collaborative connections, we can improve and increase equal access to quality therapeutic opportunities. Firefly wants to empower people with information and the ability to choose their personal wellness path with dignity and confidence.
What is Firefly doing to help?
Long-term goal:
Funded through donations, sponsors, merchandise sales, and eventually monetizing our brand though social media. Firefly Moments will to work as a non-profit organization, offering free content and sliding scale services for vulnerable populations and other non-profits on a budget. With our revenues, we can cast more nets and support systems that can build on the next, continuing to stretch the web of helpers.
With Project Comfort & Care Kits, our main source of funding, we want to provide a regularly stocked supply of emergency comfort kits to establishments that provide crisis support to people struggling with psychological distress.
As a business, we would like to be able to provide as many resources and services as possible for people seeking psychological wellness. Including information about services that provide mental health guidance, we also want people to have access to quality skills and navigation tools that encourages personal engagement in their own journey. We want to open up a support systems, create communities and continue to make collaborative connections to create safe spaces to socialize
Summing up, Firefly Moments would like to expand the opportunities that give survivors the chance to really heal and move through life a little easier. If you are interested in collaborating, contributing, or connecting, please contact us, we would love to hear from you.
The Break down
Firefly has set out a five-stage plan to keep on track with realistic manageable goals. Each stage is also broken down further to make careful details about what each step entails. Set up consecutively, each step builds off of the last. It should also be noted that this plan is still flexible and evolving.
- Care and comfort kit project:(ongoing) Firefly will be creating and selling various sized self care kits. Our Care Kits are designed to help people self soothe and have mindful moments. This Project is split into two categories Carekits as merch for fundraising, Project Comfortkits as donations. Donate bulk Comfortkits for your community Every care kit contains hand crafted or artisan items. Care kits support small local businesses and artists.
- Purple pages: The resource directory for your community sponsored by your community to provide clear information for psychiatric and supportive services available near you.
- Prepare packages: Get yourself ready for therapy, split into three modules. A variety of cognitive, behavioral, and mindfulness skills, simplified, adapted and easy to use on a self paced basis.
- Community Connections: Safe and inclusive spaces for people to connect and support each other, split into two projects. 1. Web based and 2. Face to face safe spaces to chill and spend social time together. This is Not Therapy. Most of our spaces will be online and easy to access support groups. With links to other organizations offering free and low fee social events or social groups. Collaborative System. Rules for kindness and respect will be strictly enforced. Face to face gatherings will be more like events or celebrations.
- Short stories: (ongoing) I have been listening to survival moments from many people throughout my life. People I know, some that I don’t, have chosen to share their scariest moments with me. A few have been willing to allow me to tell their hero story here for you. Always looking to retell your hero stories if you want to share, please connect with me.
Project Comfort & Care Kits
Promoting Mental Health Awareness through Love, with Acts of Kindness, Care and Compassion.
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Goal: Our aim with Care kits and Comfort kits is to provide people with self soothing mindful moments that can help calm the mind and body
Help our Cause, Donate Comfort Kits
We will be sending small and medium Comfort Kits to people using crisis support services to help survivors manage mental health and wellbeing. For your donation you can choose how many and which size comfort kit you wish to give. Our bulk sized comfort packages are sent to their recipients on a regular basis to maintain their supply. (Find our FB group link below, coming soon where you can view our list of recipients and products at our store.
Support a Loved one, Love yourself, buy a Care Kit
Your selected care kits will be packaged at order and sent directly to you or your loved one. An attached note will give instructions on how to use your Firefly Moments Care Kit. Each purchase will cover the cost of one small comfort kit for our cause “Project Comfort Kit”.
Support Firefly and our Affiliate Creators, buy our Merch-buy their works of Art
When you purchase a work of art or product from our affiliate creators you are helping to provide products in trade to be used in our Care and Comfort Kits. You will also be directly supporting our group of artists and small businesses who support and advocate for psychological wellbeing.
Firefly Merch will support our business and allow us to keep putting out quality content.
Purple Pages
No one persons wellness journey is the same as another. With the purple pages, you will be able to navigate through everything you may need for support, All in one handy directory
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Goal A: Purple Pages is a directory filled with a collection of community resources all in one handy reference book. Available in hard copy or PDF. Plan updates every two years.
Goal B: Create a web-based version of purple pages
Purple pages is the beginning of bringing helpers and caregivers together for people who need their help. Goal A and B can be written at the same time, the hard copy will be published after the web project has begun to give people a chance to be in the directory.
We will begin building our network by inviting people to join, sponsor, donate, provide a service or product to contribute to the directory.
Who would read or use this service?
Anyone interested in knowing what services are available in their local communities would enjoy having this directory. The book is a central reference system for all professional and complimentary services such as (not exclusively); Doctors, Clinics, Social workers, Counselors, Cultural and Faith-based Leaders, Shelters, Advocacy Groups and services, Outreach, and Emergency services. They would make great handouts for clients and clinicians, waiting room reading, or quick reference guides.
Primary Audience?
Anyone looking for a central location and easy access to various web-based resources. Primarily, we want to offer links to emergency services such as crisis connections services, acute, and early intervention services as well as free/low fee resources. We want to open opportunities and create a network, a web to catch the people falling through the cracks…There will be some overlap with the hard copy, many of these services will also be listed inside the book for maximum exposure.
Purple Pages will be on social media platforms later, during stage three community connections: link-up support groups, review apps, tag collaborators, write essays…. Create safe spaces for creative expression and more. Still in planning, still very flexible.
Long term goal with purple pages is to reach out to every health region in bc, and then across Canada.
Prepare packages
Knowing yourself and planning a path allows you to have more control over your dignity and long term health outcome
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Goal: Simplify and adopt healthy coping strategies to help people engage in their own care plan while sitting in the wait gap.
Our prepare packs are a set of evidence based behavioral changes that help keep people focused on their own self-care strategies while they wait for professional services to be available. There are no obligations or requirements, this is not therapy. Please refer to the disclaimer. Eventually we will be publishing audio and video files to add to the learning experience.
Who would use this service
Anyone interested in short and easy to do coping strategies to help their pursuits towards wellness while they wait for services.
Primary Audience
Anyone who has decided they are ready to seek treatment and/or in the wait gap for therapeutic treatment of their psychiatric distress. Any person who is ready to learn how to find the support system they need. Many people really don’t know where or how to start, our information can help people to navigate the system and find, then ask for help. Our Prepare packs are broken down into mini-lesson sections. Split into three modules (so far); Navigating the system, Crisis, and Acute Self Care Skills, Long-term Wellness Management. Each module will contain information, from the clients perspective, about getting the services suited for their needs.
Modules
Firefly Moments recognizes that no one is able to make changes until they are fully willing to go forward with the hard work of wellness. Healing must be a decision or it will not happen.
Module 1: Navigating the System; find your way. How to figure out, find and ask for the service most appropriate for your situation
- Know what works for you.
- Find what you need.
- Ask for help.
Module 2: Crisis and Acute self-care skills; Don’t make it worse. Basic acute self-regulation strategies to de-escalate emotional experiences and avoid making bad situations worse.
- Stop skills.
- Emergency Self care skills.
- Self soothe and distraction tools.
Module 3: Long-term illness management; Prepare to go further. Start the work build a plan
- Radical Acceptance Planning your road, Pro and Con
- Executing goals, Do it anyway.
*Note* This is still a flexible project so titles may change however the content is about finding ways to stay engaged while in the waitgap. My ‘prepare for therapy’ packages have been in the works for several decades now. This has been a deliberate plan, to delay serious writing in order to track my own years of therapy. This way, I can look back on my progress and documents to have adequate hindsight to gather wisdom from my experiences.
Short Stories
Goal: Our collection of short stories aims to validate the traumatic experiences of our readers and contributors.
A safe space to speak up about personal experience through story. The suffering we overcome, the victories we celebrate. We all have a story to tell, we have all overcome difficulties that could inspire other people.
Ending stigma by telling the stories of surviving in a new light. Told in the third person we want to use words to translate the way we live through our days. How and why the way mentally ill people think and feel is different than those who would otherwise never go through traumatic experiences. Expressions about how we celebrate our victories and how we exist with the pain of trauma related illness, disorders, and addictions.
Community Connections
Firefly is currently working on several social media platforms to create safe spaces for people to connect. by using these platforms we will be able to maintain control of safety and inclusivity for anyone seeking safety and peer support systems. rules for discrimination, respect, and kindness will be strictly enforced by teams of moderators and admins. Our community connections will be on the back burner until After the purple pages have been released and when we begin to put together our prepare packs
