The following text is by special guest author Vinita Mongia. March 2023. An elementary school in south Mississauga. I was the principal, and I had just come back from burnout. What I returned to had changed. COVID’s long shadow, students’ shifting needs, and constant change in leadership had worn the staff thin. Conversations that once ended in a plan now ended in tears. I was no different. Does that sound familiar?
Here is what exhaustion teaches you: you can’t strategize your way out of it. A depleted team doesn’t need another framework. It needs to feel like itself again. I didn’t need another strategy session. I needed my staff to feel something other than depleted. Calm. Joy. Room to create. That’s what art does. It doesn’t ask adults to perform. Educators spend their days explaining, deciding, and fixing. Put a brush in their hands and something loosens. No one is the expert. No one is behind. For an hour, they’re simply making something, side by side with the people they’ve been getting through the year with. Children know this before anyone teaches them otherwise. They never ask whether they’re good at art. They just begin. Somewhere along the way, adults learn to stop. Most of us don’t need to be taught creativity. We need permission to come back to it. So I went looking for a different kind of staff meeting. That’s how I found Artshine, and Paul Field, Founder and CEO of Artshine.
We connected on LinkedIn. From our first conversation, I knew. Paul understood exactly what I was walking into. He’d heard it from school leaders across the provinces, and the stress and overwhelm in schools weren’t a topic to him. They were the reason Artshine does what it does. Artshine knows how kids step into art: the curiosity, the risk-taking, the pride in a messy result. That same knowledge is what makes them right for a tired staff. They know how to lower the stakes, invite play, and make a room feel safe enough to try. Together, we shaped an idea: an art-centred staff meeting, built to bring a tired team back to each other. Our team doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to remember what it feels like to be a team.If your team is running on empty, or you’re looking for a way to re-engage and inspire them, start the conversation with Artshine!
Vinita Mongia is an Occasional Principal with the Peel District School Board and a Consultant and Leadership Coach to Artshine’s leadership team