502-275-3998 | care@Fw4g.com
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Get to Know Us
Creativity gives us another way in.
We've spent most of our adult lives relying heavily on language, logic, expertise, familiar roles, and familiar ways of solving problems. Sometimes we think something through until we've gone as far as thinking can take us.
Creativity gives us another way to encounter what we're carrying, questioning, building, or becoming.
We make something. Ask a different question. Hear someone else's perspective. Try something unfamiliar. Follow our curiosity. Get absorbed in a process without knowing where it will lead.
And then something we couldn't quite see before becomes visible.
Welcome to Frameworks for Growth.
Frameworks brings together people who are curious about themselves, one another, and the world around them. Some come with years of creative experience. Others haven't made anything since they were kids. Some arrive with a question or project. Others just want to try something different.
Creativity here can look like making art, writing, movement, conversation, reflection, learning something new, working alongside someone with a completely different perspective, or getting so absorbed in something that you lose track of time.
Sometimes what changes isn't the answer. It's the angle from which we're able to see the question.
What We Believe
Participant in the middle of contemplation, courtesy of ARTthrust
Meet the Founder & Creative Wellness Director
Finding My Voice
For more than twenty years, I have explored the relationship between creativity, connection, well-being, and human growth. Frameworks for Growth is the next expression of that work.
My journey began with art. As a child, creativity helped me make sense of a world that I didn't have the words for. It gave me a voice, a way to process my feelings, and a space to understand myself.
That early experience shaped the questions I would spend the next two decades exploring as an artist, educator, researcher, museum leader, and clinical social worker.
Following the Calling
Over time, I realized creativity had given me something many people were still searching for: a voice and a way to make meaning of difficult experiences. Wanting to share that gift, I began looking for ways to create those same opportunities for communities whose stories were often overlooked.
This led me to found ArtThrust, where I worked alongside teen girls and sexual and gender minority youth using art as a tool for expression, connection, and empowerment.
Expanding the Work
What began as a personal practice soon expanded into a broader mission. That path led to community engagement, social justice, museums, public health, research, and clinical mental health.
Across these different spaces, I focused on building creative responses to some of our most challenging human experiences. Over the years, I have:
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Designed trauma-informed programs and arts-in-health initiatives.
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Developed community engagement strategies for museums and public organizations on aging, grief, trauma, and gun violence.
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Worked in a clinical setting supporting people through life transitions, grief, and mental health challenges, to name a few.
The people I've worked alongside have shaped how I understand this work. We've made art in the middle of grief, laughed while carrying enormous stress, built relationships after difficult experiences, and continued to imagine a future when the present was far from easy.
They taught me something I carry into Frameworks:
Things can be hard, and we can still laugh, create, connect, imagine, and experience joy. We don't have to wait until everything is okay.
Commissioned art, Logic Working Space
Define Yourself For Yourself
Artist, Toya Northington
Artist: Edgar O'Neill
Untitled (work in progress)
Courtesy of ARTthrust
Toya Northington
Guest Speaker at High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, Creative Aging Convening
Photography by John Cherry
Community Engagement Programs at the Speed Art Museum
The Evidence Behind the Work
Bridging Wisdom and Science
For generations, artists, educators, cultural practitioners, and communities around the world have understood creativity as an essential part of life. Creative practices were woven into everyday experiences and used to teach, preserve culture, strengthen relationships, support healing, solve problems, and bring people together.
Today, growing research across public health, social work, neuroarts, creative aging, and other fields gives us new ways to understand how creative engagement affects our health and our lives.
The World Health Organization reviewed more than 3,000 studies examining the role of the arts in health and well-being, finding evidence for the arts across health promotion, prevention, and the management and treatment of illness.
Research continues to explore the relationship between creative engagement and:
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Psychological well-being — including stress, anxiety, depression, and quality of life
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Connection — including social interaction, belonging, loneliness, and social support
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Healthy longevity — including healthy aging, memory, and cognitive well-being
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Living through difficult experiences — including pain, illness, grief, and major life transitions
Science is giving us new ways to understand practices people have maintained, adapted, taught, shared, and passed on over time.
Where Frameworks Stands
Frameworks for Growth exists at the intersections of contemporary art, ancestral and community wisdom, and scientific inquiry.
We don't view creativity as a luxury. It is part of our human and cultural legacy: a way we have made meaning, shared knowledge, imagined possibilities, processed experiences, and cared for one another.
Frameworks is part of that continuing story. We draw from the knowledge and creative traditions passed down to us, the communities and people shaping the work today, and research that gives us new ways to understand what creativity can do in our lives.