Scleroderma is a complex disease and affects peoples’ lives in many different ways. It affects work, relationships, family dynamics, can cause disability and depression. The medical aspect can be overwhelming, finding the right doctors, understanding the technical details, treatments, keeping up with appointments and medications.
Workshops are activities designed to help people organize the often complex aspects of dealing with Scleroderma, balancing things like medical appointments, prescription ordering and other health related needs with life and work. How do you solve problems and make decisions about complex issues? I take participants through a series of steps on the path to getting organized and making informed decisions. Writing out the challenges is the first step. The challenges can be complex and mapping out all aspects of the challenges leads to a clearer understanding of them, providing more information to help get better organized and make better decisions, be it on care or other issues.
Workshops last 2.5 hours and are currently online. As COVID-19 conditions improve, we will bring back in person events. Workshops are broken up into the following activities:
30 Minutes – The group develops what I call a Charter. The charter is an organized way of laying out the challenges you want to address during the workshop.
30 Minutes – Understanding how you currently interact and work through your challenges and includes items like what your typical day/week/month looks like with respect to working through your challenges, who helps and/or hinders you, etc.
20 Minutes – How do you find solutions? The workshop leader will provide and explain how to use a set of tools for finding solutions to your challenges.
30 Minutes – This is a brainstorming session where the participants will take the tools provided and apply them to finding solutions for their challenges.
30 Minutes – This is an open session for participants to ask questions of either the workshop instructor or others in the group.
10 Minutes – This will be the closing session of the workshop for final remarks by the workshop instructor and final general questions by the group.
Extra 60 Minute Brainstorming Session for those interested in additional guided brainstorming.
Pricing:
For our stand alone group workshops, the 2.5 hour session is $150 per family. A family can include up to 3 people who can be family members or others who are caregivers such as home aids or friends.
The extra 60 minute group session for additional brainstorming is $75 per family.
One-on-one sessions to work directly with a facilitator are available for $150 per hour and can be scheduled online after the workshop. A link to schedule will be provided.
We understand that finances can be a challenge for some in the Scleroderma community. For that reason we offer the opportunity for scholarships for the 2.5 hour workshops. These scholarships are funded by the generosity of others in the Scleroderma community and we ask for donations to this scholarship fund. Availability of scholarships is dependent on funds available and may not be available for all workshops. Please contact us for more details on scholarships using the contact link on the top right of this page.
If you are not able to attend, refunds are available up to 48 hours before the workshop. Please send us a message using our contact form at the top right of this page.
For additional questions about our workshops, please contact us.