MENTORS

Our mentors are people who provide us with selfless and independent advice and recommendations. They help us improve our products and their psychological and therapeutic potential.

They connect us with colleagues from around the world and help us to share our experiences.

We might just need your help and advice.

My Backpack Team

The Archipelago method would not exist without the Dutch My Backpack team. Thanks to them, we have discovered the possibility of using a computer application in complex and creative therapeutic process. Every consultation with the My Backpack team and every meeting with them has moved us on. From the very beginning, it was important for us to know that these people support us.

We are happy that the My Backpack and the Archipelago methods can be presented together.

Bep van Sloten

Bep is an international consultant and trainer in the field of child protection. She specialised in family strengthening programmes, foster care and other forms of alternative care in a family type setting. She has worked in many countries worldwide.

Rinske Mansens

Rinske is dramatherapist/child psychologist (MA) en psychotherapist (i.o.) and has a broad experience in working with foster children, their parents and foster parents. She delivers the workshops for children and training those working with the My Backpack methodology.

Mathijs Euwema

Mathijs is psychologist and director of International Child Development Initiatives. He has worked for children and youth in many countries and has vast experience in capacity building of local partner organizations and conducting training. In My Backpack training he focusses on topics like the effect of trauma, separation and loss, brain development and promoting attachment.

Team of Postgradual Training in Gestalt Therapy with Children and Adolescents, Prague

Throughout the course of the Archipelago development, we were kindly supported by our kind teachers of Gestalt Therapy for Children and Adolescents. They keep their fingers crossed for us, advise us, help us find ways how to offer Archipelago to Czech child psychologists and patiently give us feedback from their own work with the method.

Over the past few years, there have been times when we would probably have been hesitant about whether and how to continue in the project without their interest and confidence.

Alena Vávrová

Child psychologist and psychotherapist

Lector and Leader of Postgraduate Training in Gestalt therapy with children and adolescents, Prague

“I perceive Archipelago as an entirely unique method of working with children who experienced the divorce or separation of their parents. The number of these children is increasing and we do not have many structured tools to support our work. It is a traumatic experience, which requires a great deal of safety, relationship (we are together in the therapy process) and the attractiveness for the children to enjoy it with us as they naturally tend to avoid the issue.

Archipelago offers all this. Thanks to the computer environment, it becomes an interesting and attractive way for children, while it is based on the relationship of the child with the therapist and it is a projective, gaming, symbolic, and therefore safe. It is difficult for us to carry a project as complex as a family breakdown, Archipelago offers a very sophisticated, wise way of dealing with the essence of the problem, the root of the trauma, the root of change for the child, and yet safely. Considering that usually it is not easy for the child to stay creative and spontaneous when facing the family breakdown and often it is not easy for us to accompany him/her within this process continuously.

Although I prefer, as probably many other psychologists, to avoid computers, with this tool I am grateful that I have it and I can use it. This program is much more than just the software, opening the gates to a complex world that turns in Archipelago into a playful way that we can manage with the child and the child can come out of it strengthened, supported and with an altered relationship to such a traumatic experience as the breakdown of his/her family.”

Alžběta Michalová