ABOUT US
After school Village is designed to address the atomistic, fragmented nature of Los Angeles particularly:
The Problem
Lack of social support once provided by traditional communities and extended family systems
Lack of constructive bridging between families and schools
Increased emphasis on measurable academic performance and testing
Economic pressure taking away from time spent with children (more caretaking less parenting)
Pressurized children manifesting as hyper-vigilant (anxiety) or numbed out, inner collapse (depression)
Media and technology dissociating children from their bodies, their senses, their emotions
Over-medicalization of children
Over-rigidility: deficits in social and emotional intelligence; inability to self-regulate and be self-aware
The Solution
Afterschool Village is a multi-age, play-focused drop-in center, based on the ecological and transactional perspective that behavior and growth arise out of children's interaction with significant people in their environment. AV's objective is to address primarily the needs of children in a relational and progressive context. AV's mission is to promote emotional, social and behavorial competence with fostering resilience, self-determination and self-efficacy. The Village will offer an alternative to traditional child-care and activity based after school enrichment programs. Our goal is happy, fully integrated, psychologically healthy children with optimal capacity for interrelatedness and a well defined concept of self.
We do it through
Play
Staff with child development and inter-deciplinary educational backgrounds who model healthy connectedness
Creating a safe, multi-sensorial (tactile, sound, smell) environment
Supportive services provided by psychologists using positive and preventive methodologies/strategies to interact with children, their families and the schools thus bridging different aspects of the child's life.
The Data
We follow cutting edge research in education, neurobiology and developmental psychology including the work of Sir Ken Robinson (Educator), Patricia Crittenden PhD (Raising parents), Martin Rossman MD (Osher Center for Integrative Medicine), Daniel Siegel MD (The Whole Brain Child), Tina Payne Bryson PhD, Allan N. Schore PhD (UCLS Center for Culture, Brain, and Development), Stephen Porges MD, Bessel van der Kolk MD (The body keeps the score), James Joseph Heckman (Economisy), David Olds MD (Nurse-Family Partnership), Steve Gross (Play Project Joy, Life is good Foundation), David Elkins PhD (The Hurried Child, The Power of Play), Michael G. Thompson PhD (Pressurized Child), Stanford University's "Challenge Success" program, Martin E.P. Seligman PhD
Founder
Raduca Kaplan received her B.A. in Comparative religion and premed studies from Columbia University and a Masters in Psychology from Antioch Universtiy. She works currently in private practice in Encino, Ca.
As a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation for 40 years, Raduca is particularly focused in her practice on the mind-body integration as well as how one functions from that level of wholeness in their relationship with the other. She uses her certification in trauma to explore the developmental aspect of early injury and how it impacts an individual's ability to relate to self and their environment. Her work with children and families, directed Raduca's interest to prevention, education and parental support with focus on strengthening the parental dyad and to recalibrate family's systemic dynamics.
Based on her 11 years business and entrepreneurial expertise from heading her family's animation studio in Europe that she started with her husband of 25 years, Raduca reoriented her passion towards founding an non-profit organization, Afterschool Village, which is a family-centered space whose scope is to help parents parent emotionally, mentally and physically integrated human beings. Raduca feels her greatest accomplishment though is her parenting of her two children and she feels grateful of the lessons she received in return that have a lasting effect on the work she does with her clients.