Advocacy for Community Engagement and Raising Awareness
Interactive Storytelling – Feel the Bars, Fill the Gap
This interactive project invites participants to complete an unfinished artwork based on true stories of children with incarcerated parents. These stories, gathered through direct connections with affected families, serve as a foundation for reflection and engagement. By actively contributing to the artwork, visitors bridge the empathy gap, transforming awareness into action. Through this creative and participatory experience, the project fosters a deeper understanding of the challenges these children face and encourages community involvement in supporting them.
Interactive Storytelling — Leaves and Stories
Using leaves as a metaphor, we craft stories of sadness, loneliness, and anxiety—feelings of leaving, separation, and loss experienced by children whose parents are incarcerated. These emotions are often dismissed by adults making policies and decisions without truly listening to children’s voices—the Story of Leaves.
This artwork is an interactive storytelling project, showcased at various locations in Virginia, USA.
Through Story of Leaves, we continue to build a bridge between children of incarcerated parents and their communities—one leaf at a time.
Networking and Collaboration
COIPI is a proud member of the International Coalition for Children with Incarcerated Parents (INCCIP), actively contributing to knowledge-sharing, experience exchange, and strengthening our global network to better support children affected by parental incarceration.
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COIPI has joined the Global Prison Nursery Network, a project led by Children of Incarcerated Caregivers (CIC), to contribute to global research, international advocacy, and policy development aimed at enhancing the well-being of children living with their caregivers in prison.
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Education and Skill Building
Workshop for Teachers
This workshop is designed to address the needs of public or private schools in helping their teachers to understand the effects of parental incarceration on children so they can support these families as children are prepared to attend school. This program could be given to all teachers as well as children of all ages.
Workshop to Rehabilitation
COIPI’s LCSW-facilitated peer coaching model is designed to offer a series of short, highly focused meetings in which each participant has dedicated time to work on his or her real-life goals or challenges. Members exchange useful coaching and materials to produce action and reflection. Each member takes relevant and realistic actions between meetings. Parents and caregivers improve their knowledge, skills and abilities to care for their children.